I'm going to talk about my view of security, which in a nutshell is about public safety. Imagine a big ring, that's public safety, inside it a smaller ring, and that's the national security part of public safety. I won't choose the Arab Spring so-called as my example although I could have done. I will talk instead about the events of August 2011 when we had some quite spectacular riots and looting in the United Kingdom. I'll use that as my illustration of the power of social media. I'll also use the Olympics, the very successful Olympic Games, to illustrate the power of social media used sensibly by the authorities to ensure the safety of the public. And then I'll talk a little bit about some of the ethical issues that arise from the collection and processing of social media. For those who want to explore that aspect with the think tank demos and colleagues there, I wrote a report, hashtag intelligence, which has got a much fuller explanation of the implications of social media than I can advance in 20 minutes. But that's basically what I plan to cover, so I hope that's something along those lines is what you were expecting. First then, some of the characteristics. This is a picture which was put up at a meeting I attended last year at the Royal Society in London, the world's premier scientific institution. The room was filled with eminent scientists, fellows of the Royal Society. Speaker put this picture up and said, how many in this room can explain why on a London bus the Ritz Cracker advertisement says the wheels on the bus go nom, nom, nom. Now looking at the age balance in this audience, I won't embarrass you by a show of hands, but amongst those eminent fellows of the Royal Society I think there are only two out of about 80 who put their hand up and said, I can explain that. And they were the probably the older fellows who had grandchildren who had explained it to them. And nom, nom is an internet phrase, norm is an internet word. A 15 year old would instinctively just know what it meant. And nom, nom is the sound of pleasure you get when you munch into something delicious or nibble the ear of your beloved or whatever people talk about on the internet. So point one is a discriminator between the generations and the younger generation. This is the world they know. We all know about these, these are the well known ones. But actually you can communicate through social media by hundreds of different sites which are not there labelled social media. They're there for other purposes, but you can use them to blog, you can use them to send messages and to interact with your interest groups. So there's a lot of this stuff out there. The basic characteristic, breaking down of time. So everything is immediate. Breaking down of distance so you don't have to be in the same place as someone to have an interaction. Breaking down of space and here a caution from me that not all social media is alike. So telephone was one to one, Facebook, you have a group and you're communicating within that group.  But Twitter is a one to many model, it's more like a broadcast. If you look at the figures and I won't bore you, take up time now, the usage is going up exponentially. And the amount of time that people spend connected to their group is going up and up and up. And the studies of workplace behaviour show that when managers aren't looking, people spend an enormous amount of time just communicating. And you might ask, as a recent article did, all this quantum physics, all this advanced technology, simply to learn that your girlfriend has just bought a doughnut. It is a very strange phenomenon but people do it. The landscape, it's got a very high visual element and that's quite important when it comes to propaganda and the use of the internet for example for radicalisation purposes. It's obviously a very superficial media and it can be and has been used obviously as I describe it there, an antidote to bureaucracy because anyone can get on it, anyone can talk about any experience of any public service and it's quickly around the world and of course not everything said on social media is true. The impact on democracy, I just want to mention because it's part of the overall picture although I'll be coming on to the more security aspects in a moment. Everyone on social media is their own journalist. Members of parliament I've talked to in Westminster and London use it all the time because it's their way now of communicating with their constituents and what happens in the constituency is instantly known to the Member of Parliament at Westminster. It's not about the writing of letters from the constituency and the sending of a reply, it's instant and this is actually affecting the way democracy works. It does enable messages to get out and cascade so if you have a special interest group then you only need to send your message to some of them. They will know the other people who ought to know the message and it will cascade downwards. It's very, very efficient as a communication device. Much better than anything in a centrally planned government messaging system. Slacktivism as it's called, I don't know if any of you use 38 degrees but you can get a petition, you can get 100,000 signatures very quickly against almost anything. Just put up a bit of a case and the example all those people 187,000 were upset by our attempts to modernise the communications legislation and the interception legislation in parliament. So democracy becomes rather liquid and this can be difficult particularly for the police services we see in the riots because you get a surge, a liquid surge of views about in that case the police are not being tough enough and they ought to deal with these rioters. It may not be well thought through but that surge can overwhelm government. On the good side, lots and lots of commercial usage. This is where the leading edge is, meme tracking as they call it. So these ideas, these memes propagate themselves through the interest groups. Lots of information for government so you can make better policy. I'm sure that is true. Public safety messages and I'll give an example to do with the riots in a moment. Obviously you can communicate very much better as government. Get your side of the case out. What I and my colleagues at Damos called sock mint social media intelligence becomes possible. In other words you can gauge the mood of a crowd from what they are saying to each other. On the other hand, as we've seen, the group has never met before. They're in communication. They tweet at each other or send messages on Blackberry Messenger or whatever. A few hours later, they've all assembled in one particular place for a demonstration about which, through traditional methods, the police would have had no warning. So just a word about these rather calling riots. It all started when this young man was shot by the police. There was a demonstration, a march to the police station. The police were very slow in responding. For reasons I didn't go into, they didn't quite take it as seriously, the protest as seriously as they should. And rumour started going around and it started going around on social media that the young man had been deliberately shot and murdered. So protest spring up all over the place. Then it turns into looting. A lot of trouble is caused. Meet at Oxford Circus, the shots are going to get smashed up, get free stuff. With a date time on it. That's the kind of message that was flashing around. And all over the major urban centres, this is what these young people were doing. And the police were run ragged. They couldn't be everywhere. And they didn't have the capacity to monitor all this stuff at the time. Where they did, then it was possible to deploy officers in advance. And there's a good example there in Leicester, which was a Facebook, the use of Facebook to identify a place to meet up, do a bit of looting, police preempted, trouble averted. All depended on there being able to get the message. On the other hand, the public was trying to use social media to provide information to the police or to ask for advice. How can I get home? Where are the riots? And the volume of calls and of internet interactions and so on, it was overwhelming the system. Because the system hadn't really been designed for this kind of interaction. As that quote at the bottom said, tweets were appearing so fast, they fell off the screen before anyone had time to read them and do anything about them. So, nice example in Hackney. Social media were used to mobilise the public to sweep up after the riots. That was very successful. People who didn't know each other, strangers, came together in common or action. Closed-circuit television identified a lot of the people. Social media posted the photographs, again made it very easy for the public to say, we know who was responsible in the end of a 4,000 people got arrested. Almost everyone who was involved, you'll help to track them down. So social media used by the authorities to get information. So lessons from all of that. Preemptive information is the key. Because if you can be fast enough, you can mobilise, you can preempt. Our unfortunate Norwegian friends simply didn't respond fast enough to the very shooting with very tragic consequences. And without giving the authorities the capacity to monitor social media, the rioters, the troublemakers have the upper hand because they can move and communicate faster than the authorities using old-fashioned traditional methods. This lesson was learnt and I was involved to some extent with the Home Office in overseeing the plans for the Olympics. The Scotland Yard built a state of the art capability to monitor social media for the Olympics and bring all the information together. Every time there was a demonstration, there were dozens and dozens of them. Every dispute, Kashmir, Palestine, the Dow Chemical Company, the anti-capitalism protesters, something like an Olympics brings out the demonstrator in people. The police were able to keep, just listen to the people involved, talking to each other and gauge the sentiment, as it's called in the jargon, the sentiment of the crowd. And in most cases, they were able to leave them alone because they could tell in advance it was not going to be violent. Were they suspected that actually there might be trouble, they could then deploy. As a result, the Olympics passed off without any great trouble but also without militarisation, without the appearance of lots and lots of officers in riot gear just in case there was trouble. So very subtle way of doing it. A good example was the anniversary, the one-year anniversary, the shooting of that young man who sparked the riots off as to Duggan. On the anniversary, there was a planned anniversary march to Totland police station and the police this time were monitoring the sentiment of the crowd and at the start of the day it was potentially violent so they were preparing the guys in the vans with the riot shields by lunchtime. It was evident that actually this was going to be a respectful protest. And commemoration of the death of this man, but it was not going to be an excuse for a punch-up. So they didn't deploy the riot police and everything passed off peacefully. If they had deployed the riot police, my suspicion is they'd have had a riot because that's what tends to happen if you go in heavy handed. So that's fine, but public acceptance of using social media monitoring for intelligence purposes is obviously essential and it's a continuum. So at one end a Twitter feed is deliberately a broadcast. The reason you're tweeting is because you want people to read your tweet and you can't really, I think, take too much offence that somebody in government or in the authorities or in the police service also reading the tweet because it's a form of broadcast. At the other extreme during the riots in 2011, some of the more determined criminals were using Blackberry Messenger, their blackberries, where the messenger is protected by a PIN number and to get that PIN number and to get the message is, in law, intercepting a communication and therefore a warrant is needed and indeed the warrants are obtained for that kind of thing. But a sector of state's warrant is required in the United Kingdom if you want to intercept somebody's telephone. In the middle you've got a grey area and the problem is the law here in the United Kingdom is binary. It's either or but in fact the reality is there's a lot of stuff in the middle. So if for example you have a closed Facebook group of friends and they're communicating but only they set the privacy settings, only they can talk to each other then if you want to know what's going on you have to infiltrate yourself into the group or you can get a warrant and you can intercept in the sort of old fashioned way but it's rather like a member of the guard in the old days, no doubt in very plain clothes sitting at the back of a Sinn Fein meeting just to see who turns up. So you infiltrate yourself under a false identity onto somebody's group and you join the group. What authority is needed for that and what audit trail is available if it should all get out of hand. Is the public acceptance of that kind of activity by the police service? Is it overseen by anyone? What happens if you think that your privacy has been intruded upon? So there are a number of issues which at the hard end have all certainly in the United Kingdom been dealt with by interception of communications. But this social media is a slightly different world. So some years ago now I published in an academic article a set of guidelines, ethical guidelines based on and those of you trained by the Jesuits will recognise these based on good just war principles. I read a few months back that Alan Rushbridgeer who's the editor of the Guardian newspaper sort of liberal left newspaper in the United Kingdom, the Guardian newspaper, he blogged, he put on his blog that he'd read my book and he'd adopted these principles as the principles for investigative journalism by his newspaper. But I actually wrote them for the policing and intelligence community because first of all there must be a sufficient cause. So you shouldn't have this capability that Scotland Yard has unless there's a very good reason for having it to do with public safety and national security, for example, protection, the detection and prevention of serious crime. But not for, I would suggest, checking up on people's tax affairs, integrity. So this stuff doesn't get a bit distorted on the way for any politicisation reasons. Proportionality is obvious. Right authority, so if there is a question asked you can find out who did actually authorise this. Again a very good principle and the right authority, it has to be lawful. So somebody's got to make a balancing within the basket of human rights including privacy. Reasonable prospects of success avoiding collateral damage. So you, particularly with family members and so on who could get quite seriously hurt with some kinds of intrusive investigation. And then finally you shouldn't be doing any of this using these methods if you can get the information through straightforward means. So those are my ethical principles. And they're only, as it were, guidelines. But they gave a sort of checklist for whether or not this kind of monitoring and this kind of intelligence activity, you can say to the public, have confidence because this is being done according to principles that I think everyone would agree to. So that's the basic proposition which we put in our demos pamphlet. And as an individual you set your privacy settings. If you really want to be private you set your privacy settings on social media to be private. Therefore if the authorities want to overcome that they must have proper authority to do so. If you're not worried well you can open up to the world but then you must accept the consequences. I can't see any other way of doing it than putting the onus on the user and educating the users to understand where their privacy is going to be intruded on not just by the state but by commercial organisations who can take the information, process it and sell it. So that's my 20 minutes. I'm going to stop at that point.


Good morning My name is Stephen Gallagher as some of you probably know and Today I'm going to be talking about how do we reset fedora to factory defaults? Dealing with gremlins in the packaging guidelines so I'd like to tell this as a bit of a story Play in three acts act one the rise of the RPM package manager So once upon a time a group of brilliant a brilliant designers and engineers innovators developed a tool called RPM They built this as a pay as a system to create it to do both building and delivery of software onto a system and It became it was a very ambitious project. It did a lot of things and really It was that hammer Right there. It is a and of course When you have a hammer, how does that expression go again? Have a hammer. Oh, yeah, everything looks like a nail. So over the so as we progressed RPM grew a lot of additional features. It became more and more complicated and Like I said, it pretty much ended up like that hammer So once we once the RPM was developed we say we started to build red hat Linux and then later fedora Using RPMs. It made it made sense. It did a lot of cool things It had the it had the ability to put just about anything on the system that you wanted it had the ability to Configure it when to it finished installing it we'll get back to that and Generally, it did a lot that other packaging formats of the era really couldn't do and And as it grew and as we built red hat Linux and fedora Linux Things started to get more complicated. We started to add a few more packages We had we started to build an entire really build an entire distribution around this thing a lot of people were getting involved they were excited and Suddenly we had a whole we had divergence starting to happen like because because RPM is so powerful and can do things in So many different ways people were doing things in many different ways So we had to solve that problem So we built the fedora packaging committee and We set up a series of guidelines for how if for how you can do things one could even say rules We can't expect everyone to do exactly the same good job So let's take let's examine the set of packages We've got figure out which ones are doing things the right way and make them into a set of guidelines and then publish Those and then so people can ignore them and continue to do things their own way wait no So that we have we have a series of checks on these things So when new packages come in we verify that they are that they have been written in you know according to these guidelines and it was good For many many years fedora has actually actually built and released. This is this is a thing that happened Contrary to all realistic expectation We have actually built something that is good and that people like we should we want to maintain this level of excellence So what happened next next we started running into a few of the places where rpm was not Particularly designed for for one part Exponential expansion of the number of rpms in in fedora In fedora, we have grown by leaps and bounds as of this morning. There are 19,470 packages in the fedora project I'm going to repeat that number because it threw me back a little bit source There are 19,470 source packages in the fedora project today Yeah, binaries. I'm not even bothering to count Especially since half of them are tech life and more of them are being reviewed every day On average for the last four fedora releases. We have added 500 new packages to the project That's 500 new packages in the last two years and Amazingly enough thanks to all those guidelines we built most of them are high quality The ones that aren't a lot of a lot of the time are ones that have just essentially bit rotted since they were reviewed And there's there have been other talks and other process other proposals on how to deal with that bit rot but for the most part we've done pretty well considering the fact that This this this curve has just continued to grow at a faster rate every year. It's kind of ridiculous But it's still mostly working. So that's not terrible. But then then the next big thing happened. Oh Wait Now we have virtualization and while we were adapting to virtualization Containers arrived because we still hadn't we really hadn't completed that that that pivot into virtualization in fedora We were a little behind the curve on that we had we hadn't really figured out Entirely how to how to play in that space but the the the real big change there was that now we are thinking entirely of an operating system running on a piece of a single piece of bare iron We're talking about density in data centers We're talking about instead of the history where you would have a couple of really beefy machines that you would Care for and feed and make sure they were you know make sure they had everything they wanted Now all of a sudden you've got virtualization and you've got 300 disposable machines that are all doing the same task that if one of them is not as malfunction you yank it out of the rack Effectively or the virtual rack and you just and you throw up another one and containers Increases this even further because you may have You may have dozens of containers running on any on any given virtual host Now we have an entirely different problem. We have machines that we want to deploy fast We have machines that we don't really need to care so much about their life cycle because they're Disposable you want something you want to change their life cycle you put you put you pull up another one And you shut this one down and what we really need to do there is we need to focus on figuring out Okay, so how do we make reusable images? How do we create these virtual machines and these containers in such a way that we can rapidly throw a hundred of them out there all at once and The way people would do this with virtual machines is you know they'd stand up a VM on a desktop in VMWare or KVM or virtual box or what have you and One person would go through and they would install absolutely everything they needed They'd they'd run it they'd run their their tests effectively a private quay environment or a staging environment then they would Manually or later. We had it. We added some tools to do this go through and Rip out anything that it was necessary that was specific to that machine things like the host ID things like You know various places that had you you IDs various places that? Had created SSL certificates by automatically to talk to between services And they would have to go and rip these out Keeping notes on everything they did write scripts so that when they deployed the new machine They could put the all those things back in So we what we were basically doing is passing on all of that effort To the users we were giving them a whole operating system, but they didn't want a whole operating system They wanted a template for an operating system and pushing those pushing those things onto the user wasn't a particularly friendly thing to do and we One of the one of the examples I'd like to use a lot mostly because it comes up at least I think when will did his Research it came up at least 16 times in the set of packages in rel and I can only imagine how many packages it shows up in Fedora was the creation of SSL certificates on during in an rpm spec file Let me repeat that people are creating Self-sign certificates in rpm percent post That's not good for a variety of reasons and For one it's If you're generating if you're trying to generate a gold image for something like OS tree or create a key Just push out a Q cow for for a cloud image and things like that You're generating the rpm. What you're installing the rpm once on a provisioning compose machine And then its results just get put out to pushed out to every machine and now suddenly you've got 5,000 machines in a public cloud somewhere that all have the exact same SSL certificate that matches that doesn't match their host name That's not gonna work furthermore, it's additional effort as if any of you went to wills talk yet two days ago It's a whole bunch of additional file operations and and f-sinks and things in the process that just simply don't need to Be there and slow everything down So how do we deal with the problem? How do we make those things go away? First we have to we have to eradicate The scripts in rpm percent post we have and percent post on and ever and wherever and frankly If I would if I can be so bold, I think we actually should Release an a version of rpm that doesn't that stops parsing Scriptlets we take that out of the system entirely What we can do now that we have system D We have we have the ability to create new system D service units and mark them as required in order to start some start other known services, so I'll take the Apache example or the cockpit example where they need to generate as an SSL certificate instead of Generating the cell certificate in their percent post though. Those are bad examples because both of those have been fixed But instead of generating an RPS and SSL certificate when you install the package We instead drop a system D snippet into into into the system so that when the hdb service is activated or either bike by socket activation or service activation it first invokes a Systemd unit file That will check to see hey those files already exist if they do I Succeed and you get on with your life if they do not you go through a script and generate them for the first time This means that we can push off the creation of any of those things that are happening in RPM Scriptlets to either the first boot or the first boot after you wipe all the after you run vert sysprep We just we pull we remove those things from the disk and we do a system D unit file that does condition path exists not You user Etsy my my my service as a cell dot cert So then we generate so we can generate those at first boot or on Subsequent restarts of the service if you forever have any reason you need to do that and they're out of the composed process They're in if they're in a space in the installed system where they can where they can be constrained by something like SELinux so we cannot so we can do a lot more protection of the end user system Because one of the things that a lot of customers and users of fedora and rel are concerned about with RPM Scriptlets is they basically especially when they're running on anaconda. They have no restrictions They they operate as root and you have to trust that somebody has been keeping an eye on what has gone into those scriptlets If you if we move those into the system with SELinux protections We can ensure that know that even if somebody managed managed to slip a little something extra into that into that SELinux is probably gonna step in and say and no no, you're You know your your video game does not have permission to have permission to read and write the add to the Apache Directory and things like that So we get a look we get more security out of this we avoid we avoid issues with with container and VM generation and Generally and generally just improve the situation all around so What we need to do next is analyze all of the packages in fedora and find out which ones need to be adapted to use this new approach As I mentioned will has done a really good job of doing going through this on rel I would like to believe that he is also planning to do this on fedora But if he's not I would like to get his scripts and get to work on it as well Yes, we should absolutely team up. Well, thank you Will will would very much prefer to team up because as he phrases it his liver would not survive it and I can see how that could be a case We do expect in the next few weeks to a couple of months to have a pretty clear picture of what the affected packages I will be and I will probably go through the fedora mass bug filing process Ideally with submitting patches submitting patches So that should that should allow us to fix those fairly easily so In summary Keep your rpms out of the light Do not get your rpms wet Do not feed your rpms after midnight. I ask I cannot Please stop working to stop working on rpms when you're tired That one that one is not only partially a joke stop working on rpms when you're tired. That is how bit rot starts I cannot As a bit of an anecdote I was going through some package the other day because That I was working with and there were actually code there were actually comments rather in the spec file That I would I had to go back and get history to find out why it was there because it just said I removed this This section because I realized I had I realized that when I had written it I was too drunk and too tired to have made any sense out of it That comment remained But not the context and that was Yeah, and when I did go back and look at it Yes, this person was definitely too drunk or and too tired to have written that but in all seriousness the package guidelines have been written and updated to support this if you have any packages that work that Haven't do any kind of system specific initialization in a Scriptlet, please Review the review the document here, which describes exactly how to write that service unit that I was just I was talking about in many cases exhaustive detail So it really should be an easy task and if you can get to that before we get to you we get to you I will have a gold star for you I don't have any right now, and I don't actually expect to give anyone out But if I but I will go and buy them and and mail one to you if if you beat us to this I Rattled through that a bit faster than I had intended so I've got a full ten minutes for questions Sorry Okay, so So the question is is there an impact on startup time to have these new units? And whether or not are they removed after they fired or not? So first of all no they will not be removed after they fire because the whole point is that we need we do need to be able to tolerate Removal of the of the files that affected that are affected because you may be in the process of generating an image Wipe them copy the image around and then we want to make sure they continue to run the startup impact when using the the system D conditionals is It has not been measured at scale But on a few packages it has been measured in the nanoseconds of additional time not the not even the microseconds Because the system D's conditional checks are pretty efficient and if that became an it honestly That would be the optimization point if we needed to it wouldn't be it would be more valuable than removing the units further questions Like I'm sorry Okay Okay, so the question is Do we have to tell people while they're creating the gold masters not to create not to start these services? Before they create the master and the answer is no they can and should because they're gonna need to test that things work what we have is We have tools like vert sysprep whose job it is to go to know which things are potentially Potentially system specific and to wipe them before So you would do vert sysprep shut the machine down clone the image We need we need to make sure that we coordinate with the vert sysprep people and if there's if there are other tools like that out there I mean, that's the best supported But if there are the tools out there like that we need to have documentation says here are the list of known things that We want to be able to remove. I had a conversation with will yesterday where we may want to have that We may want to find a way to make language in the s are in the RPM metadata that allows us to interrogate that rather than have to maintain a separate list And that and that's that's an opportunity for enhancement here Right now Vert sysprep is pretty good It knows an awful lot of these things including a whole bunch that aren't even That are in proprietary third-party code out there, you know common common customer applications and things like that so We're in pretty good shape for that right now and we Until we have that kind of introspection data We'd probably keep maintaining though the whitelist and have to volunteer volunteer as part of this process Does that answer your questions? Okay? You still look like you were about to ask another so Right so as far as the question was in terms of creating a gold master. What other settings can it could interfere? And and you know what if you wrote certain settings in your kickstart and whatnot We we probably can't solve that perfectly if you're You shouldn't the reality is you probably shouldn't be doing that in kickstart if you can help it unless you're you shouldn't be doing anything in kickstart that isn't You don't expect to be usable for all deployment all parts of your deployment if it's and if it's system specific It should be done either if it's auto-generated should we done with this mechanism if it's not auto-generated It should probably be put in by configuration management software not by We don't really need to solve that that's a solved problem So I would just say that our statement is Don't do that in kickstart. It's gonna it's going to bite you. I Think I think people figured that one out on their own now for the most part Mike again Are we the question is are we trying to get rid of rpm? Scriplets entirely or just the system specific stuff The purpose of this specific talk is to get rid of the system specific talk stuff This is one step towards the ed towards a future in which we can eliminate scrub a scriptless entirely because really They are a technology that was Powerful and useful when they were invented and have introduced so many problems that they that we need to find us a Migration strategy away from them if that wasn't if that yes, if that wasn't clear the answer is yes We should get rid of scriptlets entirely. We do not need to do that as a single action, but we need to we need to migrate each Again will talk earlier in the week and I said if you haven't seen it I suggest you can watch the recording once it's available Talks a bit more about how to eliminate some of the others I he found six specific things that covered 99% of all script use a script usage and At least five of them would be really easy not to do in scriptlets The last one the miscellaneous category is a bit more effort. I don't Actually, I don't think that would be that hard. I think all of those are possible to pull out of the script that's relatively easily and Relatively in the couple you know the next few fedora releases scheduled not like the next few epochs So will is will is reminding me to make make it clear that things like caches and catalogs are Complicated and will probably require a great deal of thought and I completely agree. That's part of why it's not part of this talk But no, I am firmly in the camp of rpm scriptlets need to need to go the way of Let's say Linux. Let's say Unix. Sure. Let's see in it dot-D. We'll go with that Our other distributions trying to get rid of their rpm scriptlets. I don't have at my fingertips that information Debin at least seems to be still pretty Bent on maintaining debconf for whatever reason I can't speak to the other distributions. I I suspect that the core OSes and the You know the other minimized container for derived distros are probably looking at this as well As a counterpoint gentu's entire package management system is a collection of scripts. I am pretty sure I Don't care. I don't see I don't really see what What the other distributions are doing is less interesting than whether or not They are coming up with clever ways to do the things I'm suggesting if we can if some of the you know I will keep my eyes open, but What little bit what little I've seen of this? Like Mandrake for example has basically just copied this This page into their guidelines So I think they're I think the other distributions are looking to us To solve this and we'll probably adopt it once we've proven that it doesn't break everything Which is pretty much par for the Fedora course actually Got three more minutes So at the rate we're currently going I've had time for one more question or else I can let you go to lunch three minutes early Thank you all for participating


Hello, I'm Michael Fully Love, the Executive Director of the Lowy Institute. Welcome to the 2021 Owen Harry's Lecture. I'd like to start by acknowledging the Gadigal of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of the land on which the Institute stands, and pay my respects to their elders past and present. This year's Owen Harry's Lecture will be delivered by the Secretary General of the OECD, Matthias Corman. Owen Harry's passed away in June last year. He was one of the giants of the foreign policy world. In Australia, he was an academic and a trusted Prime Ministeral Advisor. He also spent nearly two decades on the international stage, first in Paris as Australia's Ambassador to UNESCO, and then in Washington DC as the founding editor of the National Interest. In the early days of the Lowy Institute, Owen took an interest in me and other young scholars. He always encouraged me to address big, central issues in my writing, rather than small, marginal ones. If you're going swimming, Owen often reminded me, swim in the deep waters, not the shallows. When I was appointed Executive Director of the Institute in 2012, I recommended to the Board that we establish an annual Owen Harry's Lecture on the practice of geopolitics. The Harry's Lecture has now been given by many important figures, including US Diplomat Kurt Campbell, who was an author of the Pivot to Asia, Steve Hadley, National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, Ambassador Sharm Saran, the former Head of the Indian Foreign Ministry, Jean-Divide Levit, French Diplomat and Advisor to Three French Presidents, Jake Sullivan, who is now the National Security Advisor to President Joe Biden, and the renowned political theorist, Professor Francis Fukuyama. This year, for the first time, we have an Australian as our Harry's lecturer. Matthias Corman was born in Oipen in Belgium. At the age of 25, he moved to Australia. He served as an advisor to several politicians and worked in the private sector before he was elected to the Senate for Western Australia in 2007. Matthias was appointed Finance Minister in 2013 and the Leader of the Government in the Senate in 2017, serving in both roles until his retirement from Australian politics in 2020. In June this year, Matthias took office as the sixth Secretary-General of the OECD, the first Australian to hold this position. Matthias Corman is a very appropriate Harry's lecturer. Both Owen and Matthias served Australian governments in Canberra before moving to Paris to work in international organisations. Owen's life was concerned with the practice of geopolitics, which is now Matthias' life. I'm delighted, therefore, to now ask Matthias Corman to deliver the 2021 Owen-Harry's lecture. Matthias. Thank you very much, Michael, for that very warm introduction. Michael, distinguished guest. Thank you to the Lowy Institute for your invitation to deliver this year's Owen-Harry's lecture on levelling the playing field and agenda for growth, climate, and I rules by its international order. Owen Harris and Michael just touched on it very warmly. He was an intellectual giant, a prolific and insightful writer, diplomat and adviser who is credited as one of the architects of Australia's modern foreign policy and as founder and editor of the National Interest and in his numerous contributions to foreign policy debates, he challenged governments, policy makers, academics, and citizens to think critically about the future, which has observed us something which has still to be made. In this spirit, I think it is fair to say that Owen would have been among friends here at the OECD. Our members and partners come together to collaborate, to learn from each other and to exchange and develop best practices that empower them to thrive in an increasingly uncertain future. For the past 60 years, the OECD has unequivocally been a force for good in the world. And it has been a force for good in Australia, which this year celebrates its 50th year as a member. The OECD was set up as an organisation to facilitate cooperation among its like-minded members to achieve the highest sustainable economic growth. Our core purpose and our convention is the preservation of individual liberty and to increase economic and social well-being. We aim to help drive the further expansion of global trade. And across international organisations, we have a unique expertise in the proven working methodology, providing comparative data and policy analysis, promoting policy best practice and setting standards to facilitate greater cooperation and interoperability. Our members work together to defend and promote shared values and principles. A commitment to democracy, human rights, the rule of law, market-based economic principles, and our rules-based international trading system. We help our member countries and interested countries all around the world to deliver better policies for better lives, building on those values. Indeed, we engage with other international organisations and fora and with non-member countries, especially developing and emerging economies to broaden and to advance the beneficial impact of our policy values and principles. This was also envisaged in the OECD's convention, which recognises the importance of collaboration with and support for countries beyond the OECD membership. The issues and specific policy challenges, the world faces, necessarily evolve over time and the OECD continues to adapt in response. But our capacity to help find solutions and better wise forward together reminds. Because our shared values and principles have guided us through good and more challenging moments throughout our history, but they have stood the test of time. And they are now also underpinning the OECD's efforts to help the world rebuild after the COVID-19 crisis. Our best practice standards covering taxes, investment, corporate governance, anti-corruption and integrity, small and medium-sized enterprises, financing, state-owned enterprises, responsible business conduct, consumer policy, digitalisation, development finance, to name but a few are one of the major tools which are shared values are given meaning and promoted around the world. They provide the founding pillars of the rules-based international system and they help level the global playing field. And they chart the course to tackle major emerging challenges and advance key global priorities, such as quality infrastructure in developing countries. They support international exchange and I do support the sustainable expansion of global tried and investment. They formalise agreed best practices ensure coordination, shared responsibility and improve collective outcomes where multilateral action is required. They frame our cooperation with other organisations seeking to level the global playing field, including the World Tried Organization, with which we work closely on many issues central to rules by striding system from subsidies and resilient supply chains to excess capacity and digital tried. Crucially, very importantly, the OECD has also developed mechanisms to hold countries to account against our standards and to ensure that they follow through with timely implementation of their commitments. But it is not only our standards that matter when it comes to ensuring all countries by the rules, the five billion data points and supporting analysis that the OECD delivers every year on many issues, education, health, productivity, pensions, many others is shining the spotlight on areas where individual countries are leading by example. And where others can be challenged to do better. The OECD data and analysis provides example after example of policies that work and just as importantly, those that don't. The OECD's work then is an impetus for action and a guiding light for reform. Our work to measure government support in agriculture, fossil fuels, fisheries and industrial sectors is a case in point. This work holds up a mirror that shows governments and their citizens, the nature and style of support and what needs to be done about it. And the results of this work can be quite stark. We've shown that global support, global public support, that is government support to agriculture in 2019 to 2020 reached $720 billion US annually with all of the distortions that come with that. We've revealed the nature and style of government support in aluminum and semiconductors sectors. We've highlighted that support for below-market finance is prevalent in 13 key industrial sectors across the globe, including those affected by excess capacity. And we've confirmed the need to redouble our efforts on competitive neutrality by showing that firms with more than 25% government ownership receive more government support, distorting market outcomes, skewing private investment decisions and consequently reducing growth opportunities. This transparency is the critical first step to reform to make global trade and investment free and fairer. In the coming years, we must continue to protect, promote and advance the OECD's work as we confront the economic and social scars of the COVID-19 pandemic. This means focusing on both the immediate and the medium to long term priorities. Let me highlight five key areas. The first, we are working with member governments and stakeholders around the world to help optimize the strength and the quality of the recovery from COVID-19. Global economic growth has picked up this year and the outlook continues to improve. Though the recent emergence of a significant fourth wave across the parts of Europe shows that serious downside risks remain. Strong fiscal and monetary policy responses, the ongoing vaccination rollout, the gradual resumption of economic activities as restrictions are eased and the accelerating digital transformation of our economies have all helped with the OECD now projecting global GDP growth to reach 5.7 percent in 2021 and 4.5 percent in 2022. The economic outlook is also improving in the Asia Pacific, where we expect growth of 7.4 percent across ASEAN, China and India in 2021. And though with vaccination coverage, lagging in some areas that hampers growth prospects. Growth prospects are also hampered by restrictions and disruptions to tried and mobility. Such developments risk causing longer term scarring for workers and companies. Across the world, new outbreaks of the virus remain our biggest risk. We need to continue to pursue an all out effort to reach the entire world population with vaccines as quickly as possible. And it's great to see that after a somewhat slower start, against the backdrop of very low infection rates in Australia, Australia is now doing exceptionally well on this front. As a result of the massive ramping up of vaccination over the last few months, more than 84 percent of eligible Australians are now fully vaccinated, which is highly competitive at a global scale. But no country will be appropriately protected until every country is appropriately protected. In the meantime, policy support should remain flexible, adjusted to the evolving health and economic situation. Though the composition of that support must be better targeted to those in genuine need and towards future focused investment, particularly into our green and digital transitions and into infrastructure. Open markets, a strong competitive framework, a system which rewards the most productive and innovative business ideas and encourages investment in future growth and success will lead to quality job creation and the lifting of living standards. All OECD members, in fact, all export oriented trading nations, including and in particular Australia, have an interest in strengthening the rules by a multilateral trading system with the WTO at its centre. We also must redouble our efforts to promote equality of opportunities and to foster genuine social mobility, including by restoring and boosting opportunities for women and youth who are particularly severely impacted by the pandemic, those with low skills, those caring for children or the elderly and those who are sick. Second, we do need to continue to drive and promote global leadership on ambitious and effective action on climate change. While emissions across OECD member countries peaked in 2007, there is much more work to be done. Earlier this month, I was at COP26, where the need to accelerate global policy action to much climate commitments was obviously very stark. And it's great that more and more countries, including Australia, have committed to a net zero emissions target by 2050. However, ultimately, it will be real outcomes and not commitments that matter and to be truly effective in helping to reduce global emissions. Climate action needs to be globally coherent and better coordinated. But to better inform the necessary decisions along the way, we need better data on comparative cost, effectiveness and impact of different policy approaches. This is why the OECD established our new international programme for action on climate, which I committed to operationalising my first 100 days in office, which we have been able to achieve. IPAC is complementing the work of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change by helping participating countries track and assess their progress against commitments and improve their climate action plans to targeted policy advice and comparable indicators. Importantly, this is also why we have proposed to replicate the successful OECD G20 inclusive framework approach to help achieve our mission of global net zero emissions in a way that is globally effective and fair. Effective in that ambitious efforts in individual jurisdictions actually help reduce global emissions instead of simply shifting emissions to other parts of the world. And fair in that every country around the world carries an appropriate and proportionate share of the burden. The challenge is to ensure the level of ambition and effort in individual jurisdictions can be lifted to the level required while maintaining a global level playing field, avoiding counterproductive trite distortions and carbon leakage. An appropriately comprehensive multilateral process could help facilitate over time an appropriately ambitious multilaterally agreed internationally more coherent and globally better coordinated approach to the pricing of emissions. If OECD data and analysis of policy effectiveness has told us anything, it is that differing economic circumstances often call for different policy approaches. Our aim should therefore be to create an objectively comparable basis to assess and report on the equivalency of mitigation efforts using different policy levers to reduce emissions, taking into account both explicit and implicit carbon pricing efforts around the world. We need much better data tracking of the cost and outcomes achieved through various measures to help better inform judgments about a globally more coherent approach to climate action. Regular, transparent reporting of effort, cost and impact using different policy approaches from explicit to implicit carbon pricing will help inform better decisions. And over time, I believe an internationally more coherent approach. This is an approach which would complement, not substitute for other initiatives to address the risk of trite distortions and carbon leakage from a lifting of ambition in individual jurisdictions. I believe it can and should be pursued in parallel with other relevant measures that are designed to address the same negative spillover risks. It's also important to remember that securing the transition to net zero emissions is not a job for climate policies alone. We need a carefully sequenced and coordinated fiscal, financial and structural reform package with the whole spectrum of public policy kicking in the same direction. The third priority area relates to the digital transformation of our economies. We need to seize the opportunities of the digital transformation of our economies by better managing the risks, challenges and disruptions associated with it. But the pandemic has further accelerated what was already a rapid pace of digital transformation. For example, business surveys worldwide tell us that up to 70 percent of small and medium sized businesses have intensified their use of digital technologies due to the pandemic. And of course, there has been a massive ramp up in teleworking and indeed e-commerce. The OECD's latest broadband data shows that more than 21 million new fixed broadband connections were added in the year to end December 2020. The digital transformation brings immense benefits to economies and to societies, yet such benefits come inevitably with new and evolving and growing challenges. Today, large gaps remain across and within countries by region, by firm size, by gender and between many social economic groups. We must ensure appropriate and equitable access to digital infrastructure. We must invest in skills development and plan for the future of work to ensure that people, firms and places are not left behind that all have the best possible opportunity to participate and benefit from the digital transformation of our economies. We must also effectively address competition issues and advance work on cyber security, privacy, cross-border data, free flow with trust, tax policy implications, as well as setting values based standards, for example, on the use of artificial intelligence, ensuring it is human-centric. Related to this, but as a fourth point, we need to swiftly and effectively implement the recent historic agreement to make our international tax system fairer and work better in a digitalised and globalised world economy. The tax is one of the most high-profile recent examples of the OECD's efforts and impact to level the global plying field. 137 members of the OECD G20 inclusive framework on international tax, representing more than 90 per cent of global GDP, have agreed a landmark deal to, firstly, reallocate more than 125 billion dollars' worth of profits from around 100 of the world's largest and most profitable multinationals to the markets where they operate and generate profits. And secondly, established for the first time, a globally agreed minimum corporate tax right of 15 per cent, which will help generate about 150 billion US per year in additional revenues. These rules will ensure that large multinationals by a fair share of tax and update the international tax rules for the 21st century. Importantly, the agreement also paves the way for a pause and rollback of digital services taxes and other similar measures, which had been the source of tried tensions, counterproductive tried tensions. We now focus on implementation and on ensuring that all 137 countries and jurisdictions are ready to meet the ambitious deadlines we've set for ourselves to help bring these rules into effect from 2023 onwards. 20 members of the OECD G20 inclusive framework are from the Asia Pacific and the OECD's multilateral tax centres in China and in Korea are providing capacity building support to help officials across the region implement this two pillar agreement. Finally, we need to continue to disseminate and promote advanced OECD values principles and standards across the world, particularly across the Asia Pacific and Africa. The purpose of the OECD's global engagement is to facilitate policy dialogue and knowledge exchange and to contribute multilateral solutions to the global challenges of our time. At the OECD's Ministerial Council meeting last month, we took an important step forward to strengthen our global reach, relevance and impact through our new OECD global relations strategy. Our strategy will enhance our engagement with partner countries through our regional and country programs, as well as our key partnerships with five large emerging economies, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia and South Africa. Complimenting this, we have deployed a new strategic framework to guide our cooperation with China guided by the OECD's core values, which we're building on to shape our engagement with other countries and regions. The OECD also serves as a trusted partner to the G20, G7 and IPEC. Through our close partnerships with this forum, the OECD is reforming the global economic agenda in areas requiring international cooperation. And not only by strengthening the global tax rules, which I mentioned earlier, but also by promoting the anti bribery convention addressing over capacity and market distorting practices and advancing global discussions on gender equality and women's empowerment, among other critical issues. Our engagement has also led to breakthroughs in the dissemination of OECD standards. For example, all G20 countries have signed on to the G20 artificial intelligence principles, which are drawn directly from the OECD. We're also leveraging the collective influence of the G20 to encourage emerging and developing countries to move closer to key instruments such as the anti bribery convention and the OECD codes of liberalization of capital movements. We're working closely with Indonesia, head of its 2022 G20 presidency and with Thailand as the 2022 IPEC host to support their respective agendas and bring Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific more broadly closer to the OECD. Michael, let me finish on the issue of OECD enlargement. In the pursuit of a more level global playing field, it's in the interest of OECD members to have more countries commit as fulsomely as possible to our OECD values, principles and standards. We continue to encourage and promote the adoption of our standards by non member countries. But OECD membership is ultimately the most direct and the most effective way for us to ensure the most comprehensive application of our shared values, principles and standards across a larger part of the world, which of course is critically important to help level the global playing field. Accession to the OECD has been positively transformative for those who have joined over the past decades and it has increased our global rage and impact to the benefit of our collective membership. As such, I believe that any market based democracy which shares our values is prepared to commit to our high standards and submit a genuine expression of interest to join the OECD should have the opportunity to make its case. The OECD is currently considering applications from six countries in alphabetical order, Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Croatia, Peru and Romania. To open accession discussions, the roadmap to potential membership and the ultimate decision on membership are all matters for OECD member countries to decide in council. However, over coming months, I hope to be able to facilitate a process that will get the technical assessment process of those applications underway. This will of course also then be the opportunity to provide advice to those applicant countries on where they need to further lift their standards and their performance in order to to be able to join our organization at the end of the process. Michael, distinguished guests, all of these priorities are crucial to level. The global playing field, we're covering a lot of ground. We've covered a lot of ground today and I could keep going. But now it's over to you. Let me close by returning to Owen's Saige observation. The future is something which is still to be made and how it is made and what it will become. Will depend on people like you here and throughout the world. You can count on the OECD's continued support as we strive to chart the course for a better future together. It has been my absolute honor and privilege to deliver today's Owen Harris lecture. Thank you again to the Lower Institute for this opportunity. Thank you. All right, Matias Corman, thank you for a very interesting Harry's lecture. You're right, you covered a lot of ground. I want to go over some of that ground in the questions, but also cover some different ground if I can. Let me start with a reflective question if I can. You had a very successful career in national politics and now you've moved into international politics. So I guess a lot in your life has changed. I'm sure the commute from your apartment to OECD headquarters is a lot simpler and quicker than your commute from Perth to Canberra, for example. But what are the similarities and differences that you reflect on between national and international politics? To what extent is the skill set of an Australian parliamentarian relevant to being the Secretary-General of the OECD? Well, firstly, yes, my commute to the office now is four minutes instead of four hours. That certainly that certainly helps. Look, I mean, you know, as a as a member of an executive government, you focus every day on making the best possible decisions to set your country up for the strongest best possible future. And, you know, the work that you do in national politics, while the work that I've done in national politics has been an incredibly useful preparation for the work I'm doing now. I mean, I'm now engaging with governments around the world, understanding very well some of the challenges that they're facing, understanding very well some of the constraints that I face and in the way they need to make their decisions. But I've got, I guess I've got the luxury now of being able to think more freely without having to be too directly concerned about the immediate political execution. I mean, I think I guess I can think more freely about what would be the ideal way forward and then engaging with member governments and respecting the fact that member governments, elected governments of the day have to make judgments on the, you know, realistic political timetable within which necessary and important reforms can be pursued. So look, it's I see it really as a continuum.  But, you know, obviously, you learn a lot by doing what you're doing. And it was an incredibly good preparation for what I'm doing now. There was a lot of politics, obviously, for you to be elected Secretary-General of the OECD. It was a contested election. It was a difficult election. You were not the favourite to win. You always had a reputation for being good on detail and pretty good at doing the numbers. But tell us about the experience of running for that kind of election, which is different from a national election, where you're can you're going to capitals and you're trying to make an argument to them. Tell us about, tell us about that experience. Well, look, you know, at the time, there were 37 member countries, 26 of them in Europe, 22 of which were European Union countries, 11 outside Europe. So when you're nominated by a non-European country, of course, I mean, if you just look objectively at the numbers of where the votes, so to speak, are, then I can understand why people take that view. But in the end, the way I experienced the process is that governments around the OECD were very focused on choosing on merit, the best person for the job. The truth is there were 10 high quality candidates who all had a very strong track record of performance in their respective fields. But, you know, in the end, I think that what I was able to bring to the table compared to others was, you know, one substantial domestic policy experience. But but also, I guess, the combined background and experiences of somebody who was born in Europe, grew up in Europe, educated in Europe, but then pursued a professional career, political career in Australia and across the Asia Pacific. And I think there was a view that, you know, in all of the circumstances that, you know, well, in the end, the decision was made that I best matched what members were looking for. And of course, I'm very grateful for that. All right, let me ask you about some of your priorities as Secretary General. You charted these big five themes, and I'll come back to some of those. We asked our audience to submit questions. And I have one question from Judy Schneider. Judy asks, what changes would you like to make to the OECD so that it can better performance mission? Now, you mentioned enlargement, so the membership of the OECD.  You've been with the organization now for some months. Have you noticed some things about the OECD that you would like to change so that it can fulfill its mission of better policies for better lives? Well, you know, people often ask me the question, and, you know, what do you want to change at the OECD? And I've got to say, I mean, I think the OECD is an amazing organization, both in terms of the values and principles that we are custodian of, as well as its core working methodology has really stood the test of time. It's, you know, I'm a great believer in the power of freedom and free enterprise and open markets, you know, improving economic and social well-being on the basis of your open markets, market-based economic principles, but also facilitating social mobility and equal opportunity. These are all things that the OECD stands for and that we focus on. In terms of the methodology, we are a platform for cooperation. We have a fantastic convening power, bringing countries and stakeholders together to think through issues and find the best possible rise forward. And of course, we have this capacity where we provide this comparative data and policy analysis, best practice advice, and we set standards. Now, in terms of all of those fundamentals, I mean, I think that these are values and tools that we have to preserve. Now, the challenges and opportunities evolve over time. And right now, our challenges are how we can optimize the strength and the quality of the recovery post-Covid, how we can lead an effective response to climate change, how we can best manage the digital transformation, how we can ensure that we have well-functioning global markets in the context of pressures on our trading system before the pandemic, but still now and how we can engage better with even more areas of the world. Now, that means that in terms of your organizational lineup, you've got to ensure that you've got the skills and the capabilities that best enable you to meet those objectives and to deliver on those priorities. But I don't see a need for substantial whole change, whole side change. In fact, I mean, often, I think it's as important to be very mindful of all of the things that you need to preserve and not change as it is to think about the things that might need adjusting. I mean, to the extent that there is adjustment, I think it is evolutionary and at the margins, not sort of fundamental reshaping. All right, Matisse, you mentioned that more than 130 countries have signed up to a global minimum tax rate for big business. I'm sure there are armies of tax lawyers around the world that are licking their lips at the work that they have in front of them. How confident are you of implementing that policy? Well, look, I'm quite confident. I mean, the difficult part of this process was to get 137 countries to agree. I mean, and indeed, you know, we ended up with 137 countries representing more than 90% of world GDP. But also every G20 economy from the US across Europe, China, India, Russia, South Africa, Saudi Arabia and indeed every European Union country on board. So, and, you know, importantly, I mean, this is not about eliminating tax competition. There is, of course, an important spice for tax competition, but it puts multilaterally a great limitation on it. And, you know, we do believe it will make the global tax system fairer and work better, given that, you know, increasingly because of digitalization and globalization, too many of the largest, most successful companies were able to restructure their affairs such to apply very little or no tax on the profits that they generated in markets around the world. So there was a real inequity. There were some real distortions that had to be addressed and our deal addresses them.  So, you know, if you don't give yourselves a tool to do that yourself out of your own country, you leave money on the table for other countries. So, I mean, I think I do believe it will be effective and I do believe that there is an interest, the serve interest for all countries around the world to implement this consistently. Matthias, let me ask you, the OECD is an organization of market-based democracies, largely like-minded countries. I know that the OECD itself probably doesn't have a direct role in meeting the challenge posed by a rising China, but you are mixing with officials and elected officials from like-minded countries all the time. Do you detect in those meetings a focusing of the mind on China? Do you detect a change in the way European countries are thinking about China, for example, from thinking of China really as a market opportunity to thinking of China in a more 3D way as a strategic actor and potentially a threat? Well, look, firstly, I mean, China is, of course, a significant market. It's now the world's second biggest economy. It's a biggest trading partner to a growing number of countries around the world. And so, of course, countries around the world have an interest in having the best possible relationship with China and they're also issues, whether it's climate change or international tax or a series of other issues that can only be effectively addressed by having all of the major and minor players around the table. And issue like climate change will only be able to be addressed effectively if the US, China, India and others are around the table. So there's a whole range of areas where it is very clear that we must find ways to effectively cooperate.  I mean, the OECD is an organization that brings together market-based democracies, so that share a commitment to democracy, human rights, the rule of law, market-based economic principles and the political and economic system in China is different and inevitably there will be pressure points from time to time. Now the key is going to be to work through those in as positive and constructive a way as possible, but also to be very clear on where it is important to stand up for interest and to draw lines in the sand. And when I think that that's gonna require appropriate balancing for some time to come. I mean, ideally, we will end up with an appropriate sustainable accommodation in the context of an international rules-based order where we can continue to live together harmoniously, peacefully and pursuing the further expansion of global trade to mutual benefit. Matthias, you spoke a lot about climate change. Let me ask you about Australia if I can. As you mentioned, Australia has now committed to net zero emissions by 2050, but we still don't have a particularly ambitious 2030 target. Would you have liked to have seen countries like Australia take more ambitious targets to Glasgow? Well, look, the key is to move the world to global net zero by 2050, and we do need to have credible and realistic transitions there. But we also got to recognize that different parts of the world have different starting positions and face different circumstances and find themselves in a different economic context. And when I think it is very significant that Australia has committed to net zero emissions target by 2050 and there is a transition pathway now under why. I mean, Australia historically has a truck record of not just meeting, but exceeding its emissions reduction targets. It's made and exceeded its Kyoto targets. As I understand it, Australia is on truck to meet its 2030 emissions reduction targets, which on a per capita basis is one of the steepest targets around the world. But look, I mean, I think it's always important to be more ambitious, but it's even more important to be able to deliver the outcomes and the outcome that we need the world to deliver is global net zero by 2050. And in that sense, we've got to continue to make decisions that help reduce the global problem that don't just shift the problem from one jurisdiction to other jurisdictions around the world. And I mean, Australia compared to Europe is a comparatively small domestic economy. It's export oriented, a trading nation, but it's also an export exposed trading nation surrounded by comparatively lower cost, higher emissions intensity, manufacturing competitors. And these are all things that you need to consider when you make your policy decisions. As Europe is now, of course, considering the risk of the competitiveness implications and carbon leakage risks in the context of its discussion on the carbon board adjustment mechanism. I mean, we need Australia to reduce emissions in the wide that helps reduce emissions for the world. We don't need Australia to reduce emissions in the wide that shifts those emissions along with activity and jobs into the neighborhood where for the same level of output, emissions would be higher. I mean, the worst thing in terms of our overall objective would be if Australia were to make decisions that shift activity, jobs and emissions into other parts of the world where emissions are going to be higher and the global emissions outcome would be worse. I mean, that's been my consistent argument incidentally. And that is why I'm very much from this position trying to help drive a globally more coherent, a globally better coordinated approach to the pricing of emissions because that is the only way you ultimately can use that tool to help drive effective emissions reductions globally. All right, Matias, let me ask you about COVID. Vaccine take-up is very strong in countries like France and you mentioned Australia, but of course there are huge parts of the developed world where vaccination is not going to take place for a very long time. As you sort of intimated, I think in your lecture, none of us really are safe until all of us are safe. Shouldn't OECD members be doing a lot more to vaccinate the developing world? Well, I mean, OECD member countries are doing a lot, but I mean, it is true. I mean, the challenges, you know, logistics and distribution challenge, which shouldn't be beyond us to resolve. I mean, you're right. I mean, there's a particular challenge in developing economies, but there's also perhaps not as well known a pretty significant challenge across a large part of Europe. I mean, yes, France, Belgium, Germany, countries in Western Europe have got relatively high vaccination rights, but if you look at Bulgaria, Romania, some of the central European countries' vaccination rights are quite low and the fourth wife that is going across, you know, everything east of Germany at the moment is pretty significant. Now, look, yes, I mean, the short answer to your question is yes. Developed economies have a responsibility to do more. It's not just charity either. It's self-interest because we won't have sustained health protection until such time as, you know, we've got appropriately comprehensive global coverage of vaccinations and we won't, I mean, the economic recovery will remind at risk until such time as we've got appropriate coverage, global coverage of vaccinations. And in the end, our biggest risk continues to be the further waves of infection. Let me ask you about Australia's approach to the pandemic. The Fortress Australia approach certainly kept Australians safe, but there were significant downsides to that. We more or less locked off the country for the better part of a year and a half. I think the effects of the policy were felt very much by immigrants to Australia who weren't able to visit family overseas, expats, members of the Australian diaspora, of which you're now a member. How do you feel about the approach that Australia has taken to dealing with the pandemic? Look, I mean, I don't think that given my history and even my current position that I should be a commentator on domestic politics in Australia, I mean, let me just say that countries, in countries around the world, governments of around the world were faced with an external shock for which there was no rulebook on how to deal with it. Governments around the world might, the best possible decisions about way of crisis response, I think that Australia performed very well in that context. In the end, I mean, there's our judgments for democratically elected governments to make and I guess as a citizen, the observation I would make is that the governments that have been subjected to democratic scrutiny of an election since the pandemic and since the sort of response has been rolled out in Australia have all done very well. So it appears to me that the population of Australia in the broad is supporting the government's responses in the broad. Like, I mean, moving forward, of course, I mean, we want to move into a world where, we can live with the virus where we can manage the risk of the virus while returning to as close as possible in a COVID-safe way. And that's where high vaccination right is so important. I mean, Australia now has a vaccination right approaching 85% of the eligible population, which is tremendous. And that will be the key to help, I guess, return life back to normal. I mean, having the East Coast now open for return travelers without quarantine, for return vaccinated travelers without quarantine, obviously shows what is possible when you have appropriately high vaccination rights. And I do hope that Australia can remind comparatively COVID-safe. Now, Matthias, I know you don't want to get into Australian politics, but I do want to ask you about immigration, if I can. And it's a question actually from my chairman, Sir Frank Lowey. He's a believer in immigration. And I know you've had a remarkable immigrant life, really, immigrating to Australia in your mid-20s, playing a significant role in our national politics, and then going overseas to represent Australia, as it were, as the head of an international organisation. It's a testimony to you, but also, of course, to the Australian society that is open to immigrants in that way. The question I have for you from Sir Frank Lowey is this. During the pandemic, immigration to Australia essentially stopped. Do you think that Australia should now boost its immigration intake to make up for the immigration pause we've just experienced? Well, look, you know, firstly, I'm a great believer in, you know, the beneficial impact of migration among Australians, an incredibly successful multicultural society which has been able to successfully integrate successive wives of migrants from all corners of the world. And, you know, my message to migrants in my first speech in the Senate, the Australian Senate, was that Australia is a country where, you know, if you put your shoulder to the wheel and if you come with the right attitude and have a go, there's really no limit to what you can achieve. And it's genuinely true because, I mean, Australians are very open, minded, very welcoming, and really just look at what you do and not at where you come from or what your background is. Very, very open and welcoming society. And look, the specific decisions in terms of level of migration, I mean, there's going to be judgments for the Australian government to make, but as a principle, of course, I mean, I'm very supportive of strong levels of migration. I think that migration has served Australia very, very well. I mean, in terms of the economic and social development of our country. Can I ask you, Matthias, you're a rare Australian in running an international organisation, and your election reminded me that there haven't been that many Australians running for and winning top job, top international jobs. Why do you think that is? I don't know. I mean, I, you know, the Prime Minister asked me whether I was prepared to put my hand up for this vacant position at the OECD. After some thought, I said, yes. And, you know, we worked as a team. There was a team Australia effort to try and secure the position. And I was very grateful for that support. And as a team, we were ultimately successful. Now, I mean, I think it's really a case-by-case proposition. I mean, I think that Australia and Australians have a lot to offer. It really just depends on the opportunity and making sure that, you know, when it arises, that you give it your best possible shot. All right, final question, Matthias. I've mentioned this, the journey you've had in your life, moving from the heart of Europe to Perth and now travelling back to the heart of Europe at the OECD. And you mentioned that in your campaign, you were running as an Australian, of course, but someone who'd grown up with Europe, someone with a European heritage. Do you find now that you look at Europe through Australian eyes? But I got to say, like, so I left Europe in the early 90s. And so shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, shortly after, I guess, you know, central and Eastern European countries opened up. And to come back, you know, 27 years after I first went to Australia and to sort of see how those parts of Europe, which were behind on the other side of the Iron Curtain, have developed and gone, you know, in leaps and bounds forward, is just really heartwarming. I mean, it just shows it's such a case study again, long-term case study, which shows that, you know, market-based economic principles work in lifting living standards and quality of life. I mean, political choices matter, democratic governance matters. And indeed, market economic principles work. I mean, I was in Warsaw yesterday to mark the 25th anniversary of their membership of the OECD. And I mean, over the last 30 years, since Poland regained its freedom and opted for democracy, I mean, they've just really gone in leaps and bounds forward. I mean, their GDP per capita has quadrupled over 25 years. And, you know, to see the transformational power and the impact on the quality of life of real people all across, even across the world of the values and principles that we as an organisation stand for, it's just really heartwarming. Matthias Corman, thank you for joining us from Paris today for delivering the Harry's lecture and for taking my questions. You have an exceptionally interesting job and we wish you well. Thank you very much, Michael. And ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us for the 2021 Owen Harry's lecture. Next week, the Lowy Institute will host a digital conference on the Indo-Pacific operating system. There'll be keynote speeches by Matthias' former colleague, Defence Minister Peter Dutton, President Biden's Indo-Pacific Tsar and former Harry's lecturer, Kurt Campbell, as well as by Lowy Institute non-resident fellow, Nadej Roland. Please register for that conference. And in the meantime, thank you again for joining us to listen to Matthias Corman and to honour Owen Harry's. Thank you.