I thought I might start the questions by asking, and by the way, they need not be questions.
There's been some very interesting conversations during the morning tea break, so feel free
to make statements, comments, whatever it is that you need to do, but I want to find
out about humility.
So let's start with that, and then we'll take some comments and questions from you.
All right.
So, talk about a planted question, and I've suggested you ask me, and how you've asked
me.
The first thing to say about humility is what it's not.
Humility does not mean groveling.
It does not mean constantly apologizing.
It does not mean critically a lack of confidence, and all too often these days in what I think
has been an extraordinarily macho period of American politics, the very idea of humility
has been discredited.
But that is not true in American history, and the best place to start is George Washington.
Read the speeches of George Washington, which are the most extraordinarily humble speeches
in the sense of a president who starts everything with cognizant of my faults and defects as
I am, and the extraordinary honor that I've been given to lead the country, but of course
I'm very aware of my mistakes.
Humility is that quality.
It is the quality of understanding you don't know everything, you will make mistakes to
err as human, and you have things to learn from others.
It doesn't mean you can't be proud, you can't be confident, you can't be strong, but it
means it is, as far as I'm concerned, the soul of wisdom.
It is a proper understanding of what you can do, but also what you can't do, of what you
know, but also what you don't know.
And in that regard, it has been singularly missing from United States policy, not just
the last six years, but I think from the end of the Cold War in many ways.
We have not been particularly good at admitting both our actual mistakes and our capacity
for error.
Why do I think it's so deeply ingrained in American history?
Well, there are three reasons.
It's not just George Washington.
But the first is, it's deeply embedded in the very American commitment to progress,
to this singularly linear narrative of the world that we often subscribe to.
When I taught at Harvard Law School, I was constantly being accused of falling prey to
the mirage of progress narratives.
Well, fair enough, but it's deeply embedded in a liberal enlightenment view of the world.
And I always tell people that when I grew up in the United States in the 1960s and 70s
in Virginia, the idea that we could have a serious black candidate and woman candidate
for president was so unthinkable.
I can't begin to describe it, so I hold to the notion of progress.
But if you look at the American bestseller list, it's all about self-improvement all
the time, right?
It's whether it's dieting or business or you name it, it's all about self-improvement.
You cannot believe in self-improvement if you don't believe you have room to improve.
And that is part of the soul of what I mean by humility.
Second point, it is totally embedded in religion.
Every religion, every religion is premised on the idea that you must, in the words of
Micah, which is the end of Governor Winthrop's speech about the city on the hill, do justice,
love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.
That means submission.
There is no religion in the world that does not have the idea of being small in the face
of much larger forces, another key dimension of humility.
Today that is a large part of what I think environmentalism is about and what many secular
people feel in the presence of nature.
They may not believe in a God, but they are often profoundly aware of the spiritual quality
of natural forces.
Whether it's the mountains, the ocean, the large forces that are bigger than any one
of us.
And finally, humility is an essential for all the other values that I talked about.
You can't have ordered liberty if you are not willing to at least acknowledge, if not
respect, the rights of others to do as they want to, even if you profoundly disagree with
them.
You have to have tolerance or democracy and those two are deeply allied if you do not
similarly have the understanding that you do not know everything.
What in the end is the most fundamental difference between fascism or authoritarianism and liberalism?
It is the notion of plurality.
It is the notion that know your prescription is not the prescription for everyone else.
It is also a key part of justice.
We have the presumption of innocence.
The presumption of innocence is a statement about the fallibility of human knowledge.
And when you teach in a law school as I did for so long and you take criminal law, the
first thing you do is run an eye, you know, a crime is committed right there and then
we ask all you what you saw.
And of course, you saw many different things and you think you believe absolutely what
you saw.
But our justice system is premised on the idea that actually that's not true, that you
have to prove that someone is guilty.
And finally, equality, the belief, again, in the, at least in the United States, a level
playing field, a quality of opportunity, is also premised on the notion of what a truly
equal society can create, the power of people who start from many different places to actually
make a contribution, whether it's to make millions or it's to make a contribution in
the arts or simply as members of a civic community.
So a concept of humility, as I define it, as an awareness that you don't know everything
and you have much to learn and that you will air, is, I think, deeply embedded in the American
character.
Thanks very much.
So, let's start with Alan Dupont and could I just remind you that if you are making a
comment or asking a question to state your name and affiliation and it is being recorded
so if you can also make sure you've got a microphone with you before you start to speak.
Amarie, you've counterposed two competing schools of thought in the United States about
the nature and the taxonomy of threats to the US, the multiple sort of threats that
you've posited and the single threat.
But putting that aside, regardless of that, how do you see the new kind of threats arising
in the world shaping US foreign policy over the next 10 or 15 years or so?
Do you see essentially a continuity in foreign policy or do you see some significant changes
and adjustments ahead?
And then I'd like Alan, depending on your answer to that, to respond as to what that
might mean for Australian foreign policy.
So Michael did a great job on this yesterday.
I can be brief.
I think any president with the exception of Mr. Giuliani, about whom all of us think he
is the closest to a continuity, I think any of the other candidates will reverse the idea
of preemptive war, whether they do it explicitly or implicitly.
You will not see preemption in the next national security strategy.
They will reverse radical unilateralism.
They will return to an embrace of some international institutions, which ones and how will vary.
And they will retreat from radical democratization.
So if you think that the hallmarks of the Bush Doctrine were preemption in the military
area and democratization in the political, we're in for a change and high time too.
From there, so yes, there'll be major change.
Beyond that though, whether we'll really internalize a world of multiple threats and
multiple powers, I think does depend on who is elected and how adept they are at leading
within institutions, formal and informal, rather than against them.
And the political appeal of leading against them is always there, more there for a republican
than a democrat.
One of the things that Australian foreign policy has been preoccupied with and has
been good at over the years has been managing great powers.
I mean, we're actually quite good at it.
We get away with a lot.
We're good at advancing our interests sometimes in an unworthy way, as Bob was saying I think
about the US and about the commitment in Iraq.
But managing great powers is going to get more complicated for us because we're also
going to have to start managing Beijing in a different way.
So I think for Australia, we're going to be living in a world where there are this sort
of myriad sort of new threats of the order that you've worked on and described.
So we'll, plus at the top of it, this quite old fashioned issue of great power relations
which we will need to manage effectively and will.
Let's go to the back of the room.
If Celestia could just give the microphone to the person closest to her, that would work
well I think.
Thank you.
Ross Buckley, University of New South Wales.
Dr. Gingel posed an idea of Australia as a multiple threat place and as opposed to America
being more of a single threat place.
My questions for Professor Slaughter, has anything been done on the idea that America
best understands itself in contrast to another and that the USSR was that other for a long
time and with the decline of the USSR, America needed another other to best understand itself
and that was why G-WAT instead of G-SAVE.
There has been much work in many different disciplines on othering and how that is embedded
in various ways in the national psyche and internally as well.
I mean all these, the negative view of American pluralism is all these different groups happily
defining themselves in by contrast to another, whether it be white versus black or Korean
versus black or with Hispanics versus whites, whatever the groups may be.
So I think there is a lot in that and there is a lot in the idea that fear was very deliberately
marshaled in the service of this one great cause because it meant that we were at war
and being at war meant you could do all sorts of things domestically, you couldn't do otherwise.
I think though I would flip it, I think there is something in it but we were talking in
the break about the remarkable American commitment to a set of values that is not about an other,
it's about who we are, which is why I wrote the book the way I wrote it and the title,
the idea that is America came from a letter of a military captain to Senator John McCain.
I think it's very much what we just heard that Americans don't question the idea that
there is an idea there is America or a meaning that there is America and in that sense it's
not about an other, it's about a civic glue, an overriding commitment to a set of constitutional
values that is what has often been described and I believe in as a civic faith and even
as I think a fairly sophisticated intellectual as an American lawyer and as the daughter
of an immigrant I can get pretty teary about the Constitution and I think that's pretty
distinctively American.
I'm trying to imagine us getting teary about the Australian icon, I don't see it.
Alex, could you give it to the person in front of you?
Michael Fully Love from the Lowy Institute.
Can I compliment both speakers on their remarks but can I direct my question to Professor
Slaughter because Alan's my boss and I get to ask him questions all the time.
Can I push you Professor Slaughter on the confidence that you displayed in your last
question to America's capacity to respond effectively to the complicated and shifting
array of new threats that you outlined in your speech.
I think a lot of friends of America have been disturbed by America's effectiveness and performance
over the past decade.
You seem to put a lot of that down to President Bush in your last question but can I suggest
to you that the Iraq War was a failure not just of the Bush Administration.
It was a failure of the Democratic Party because most mainstream Democrats supported it.
It was a failure of the American political system which showed itself incapable of sorting
out different priorities.
We've seen a failure of the US government and the US military which has turned out to
be much less formidable than we thought it was and perhaps most disturbingly it has been
a failure of America's analytical and intellectual infrastructure because most of the analysts
in the leading Washington think tanks and not all but I would say a majority of the
serious commentators supported the Iraq War.
Now was this just a fluke or does this point to a flaw in the way that the American system
works and why should we be confident that the American institutions have the capacity
to deal with the threats that you laid out which are actually far more troubling and
complicated than that posed to Saddam Hussein and perhaps to end on an optimistic note because
I know you are an optimist how can the next president reshape the system and the balance
of how those institutions operate to respond to these threats which are much more difficult
than the ones that President Bush had to deal with.
Okay so let me try to address that in three points one sort of can we actually succeed
to the issues specifically about Iraq and three how.
So there is a great debate within the United States about whether this is another cycle
that we will recover from and then I would say let's look at the late 19th century when
our political system was completely corrupt we didn't have anything like the domestic
safety net we needed it was robber baron capitalism crony politics a complete mess.
So the optimists among us look at that and say we did it once we can do it again we
are at a really low point but we are going to come back.
Others simply say looking at world history this is our Roman moment you know we are now
sliding down and you know complete with practically honey stuff dormice when you look at the kind
of decadence of the top level of American consumption there is a lot to see and we are
reading lots of books about that and then the question is so we are just another empire
among others and we have hit our zenith and we are on the way down.
My response to that is we are not an empire like any others we are mostly because we reflect
all the world's peoples and at our best we draw on their capacity and their creativity
that is my view but that debate is open and I obviously could be wrong and in 20, 50 years
we will know.
But the second point Iraq to what extent is Iraq an indicator of what is really wrong
in some ways very much so I mean Congress has not exercised its power particularly regarding
the use of force we don't have enough deliberative democracy above all we have a huge drain of
talent outside of government wearing my Dean hat I can tell you that 50% of the American
federal government is eligible for retirement at the end of this year 50% why because they
went in after Kennedy's great call to service and they have been steadily leaving since
and they haven't been replaced because the best minds in the United States are going
into non-governmental organizations and investment banking and sometimes one and then the other
and that's a serious problem if we do not get really talented people back into government
we've got an issue but I think Iraq was in many ways an aberration you've got to remember
you know European intelligence also believe there were weapons of mass destruction Israeli
intelligence believe there were I mean there's a lot of revisionist history but I remember
talking to my friends in the Clinton administration saying what about this and Clintonite saying
yeah yeah the intelligence is good they really do have weapons so it's if we really go back
to what it looked like then it didn't look like a project to democratize part of the
Middle East it looked like a situation where a guy who we had to go to war with once before
still had really dangerous weapons in the aftermath of fair of of Kosovo and other human
rights interventions it was a colossal error but I don't think it's a fair way to judge
the overall caliber of the of the country and I think the military actually has done
just fine the failure has been deeply political you know the minute the major combat stopped
we should have had an entire panoply of other institutions we didn't but the last point
how can we respond or can we I think the key really does rest on can we develop a positive
narrative that is sufficiently unitary to allow for institutions to devote to a tackle multiple
threats at once I don't think we'll succeed if we approach it as we got a fire on all
cylinders we need the kind of vision we did have in the Cold War which was not just containment
it was a positive vision of standing for a world of liberty a world of democracy however
you wanted to put it and we need to update that vision to take account of 21st century
realities Helen Irving and Helen Irving Sydney Law School I want to ask you Professor Slaughter
about the concept the idea or the ideal of ordered liberty and about the tension between
the two parts of that expression order and liberty particularly with respect to the sort
of catastrophe catastrophe or emergency scenario that many people are driven by and much policy
is driven by not merely well it's certainly an issue in countries which lack a tradition
of liberalism or constitutionalism but not merely there in our own countries our own
constitutions are very poorly provided provide very poorly for mechanisms for dealing with
emergencies or catastrophes that have both the elements of order and liberty in them
and we've seen in both our countries an accretion of power towards the executive which has tended
towards perhaps giving greater balance to the order part of the equation but not to
the liberty part emergency jurisprudence is very undeveloped you would you'd be aware
of some of the efforts that have been made Bruce Ackerman and so on but it's still I
think a huge gap in what you hold up as an ideal with respect to the very fears that might
drive the ideal or with respect to which the ideal might be held out as a unifying solution
how do you do you do you have a way of resolving the tension between order and liberty precisely
in those sort of emergency or catastrophe situations that might be driving an alternative
vision so it's an excellent question and I don't think you could ever resolve it I think
all of our societies rest on it you know there's a balance between order and liberty and it's
a shifting balance depending on where you are and in any society whether during wartime
or are under threat in various other ways that balance will shift it'll also shift depending
on cultural traditions so it's a question of where do we strike the balance under emergency
and there if you look now in the US you'll see the pendulum swinging back right so on
the Patriot Act you on passing the Patriot Act you had libertarians lined up with the
ACLU on both sides of the political aisle saying whoa this is really gone too far and
the wiretapping has been a huge issue politically the Democrats in a campaign season signed back
on but there will be major change if there is a democratic government and similarly I
predict that the Supreme Court is going to establish habeas corpus for even detainees
in Guantanamo the big question is what happens if there's another attack before that really
happens and in my view the greatest danger is that we are not prepared for the political
fallout that we ought to be bringing together newspaper editors editorial boards and major
shapers of public opinion to say okay there's been another attack of the magnitude of 9 11
or on a major scale what do you write the day after do you write okay you know now's
the time we lock everybody down forget civil liberties safety first or do you write you
know there are things more important than life that was the idea of our country to begin
with if we sacrifice our civil liberties we handed them the victory and that I'm not sure
what would happen if we did if we did it today but I do think you can prepare for it if you
if you're cognizant of that danger I just want to go way up the back so that's true
if you could over on the side there Gregory Rose from the University of Wollongong wanted
to make partially a comment that reflects some discussions during the break where we
talk about ordered liberty and therefore the rule of law I think that this relates to the
previous question in relation to emergency powers but in the international context where
we're talking about the rule of international law I think that there is perhaps useful work
that attendees here could do to question the notion of legitimacy in the rule of international
law and I'd suggest that really we're looking in contemporary circumstances at the rule
of international fiction because unless parties agree by consensus to a contemporary international
norm without an enforcement mechanism and without a perception of legitimacy in democratic
terms for those norms we rely entirely upon the fiction of sovereign equality we've transferred
upon nation states the notion of individual equal potential and created a united nations
system where decisions are made by a two thirds majority vote in the general assembly or by
two thirds majority vote in fora outside the assembly adopting treaty instruments where
relatively Nauru with a population of 5,000 has the same negotiating rights and voting
rights at least as the United States or China or India and although we have within the security
council certain normative powers those have only really been exercised in the first half
of the 1990s and therefore most international norms and certainly those that have been referred
to in the morning's discussion are treaties that are not actually United Nations security
council resolutions but are adopted by consensus or by vote of the members and when we refer
to the rule of law and ordered liberty we're actually referring therefore to consensus
voluntary participation or to a rhetorical flourish where we speak of the rule of law
as a binding norm when in actual fact it lacks legitimizing authority basically that of
a representative democracy so I put forward I suppose a challenge to the room to think
about the notion of sovereign equality in the formation of international norms and what
that means for international relations and international law and suggest that actually
as international relations and international law experts we've perhaps neglected to consider
it because we have a vested interest in giving authority to those norms in our field of expertise
and I would then put it to Professor Slaughter and Dr. Gingel how can we work within a United
Nations system as opposed to within a series of ad hoc alliances to create norms which actually
are perceived as having legitimacy not only by the developed countries that don't have
a seat on the security council or in the P5 but also by the major powers such as the United
States and China thank you and I apologize for the long statement.
Well let me take a first crack the so first thing let me let me start by just saying
that as imperfect as the rule of law is internationally if you're an international lawyer you must
take a long view and by the long view the fact remains that if Iraq had invaded Kuwait
in 1891 the response would have been radically different than in 1991 in 1891 there was no
international rule against using force against another country war was the continuation of
politics by another means and that's what you got to do in 1991 it was quite easy for
the United States and other countries to assemble a global coalition precisely because
of the legitimacy of the notion that you don't just invade another state now I'm aware of
the irony to say that when the United States is invaded Iraq I understand that but I also
understand the United States did everything it could to try to get UN authorization not
everything it could have done more but it at least understood you could not simply invade
a country without going through the United Nations and trying to frame arguments in the
context of international law I would also just say the idea that we have an international
criminal court is extraordinary when I went to law school in 19 graduated in 1985 there
was no such thing as international criminal law it just didn't exist there were the Nuremberg
trials that was it the idea that you'd have Milosevic in the dock that you'd have you
know specific tribunals for specific crimes and then an international criminal tribunal
that was permanent was unthinkable and yet that's only 25 years so take the long view
but the point about legitimacy I think the United Nations is deliberately an organization
that pay that has sovereign equality in one half but the Security Council is a profoundly
realist in a construct it it recognized that some nations were going to be more equal than
others in the EU you have weighted voting you recognize that some countries are more
powerful than others the IMF and the World Bank same thing I think you need to expand
that system because you've only got some countries that have that power but any workable system
will recognize the reality that although if you choose to join a treaty you have one vote
in fact to make rules that are binding in any institution you've got to give big countries
more weight than small countries but ultimately I think international law in the 21st century
is going to be a very messy combination of informal international institutions regional
institutions alliances and exactly what Alan Gingel just talked about which is these trans
governmental networks that are very informal but that often have a great deal of weight
and we're just going to have to muddle through I'm I'm all in favor of muddling through
and I think that's exactly what we do most of the time and and what we have to do the
the particular the particular issue Australia faces in a way is how you how you ensure small
voices have some sort of role we're surrounded by by by very small countries and I think
that that that means there's there'll still be an important role for regional bodies in
all this whether they're the smaller countries of Southeast Asia dealing with the the you
know China and Japan all the small countries of the of the South Pacific so I think it's
going to be a sort of a mix and match sort of arrangement that we'll have we have time
for only one more question I'm aware that there's been someone trying to speak here
at the front David Pumphrey from Hydrogen Struggles I wanted to push a bit on Michael's
supposition that there might be a flaw in the rich tapestry of America to take Alan's
epiphany my epiphany was a long time ago when I went to kindergarten in an arbor Detroit
and in those days which was actually in the early 50s we had to stand and salute the flag
and sing the Star-Spangled Banner and have a rest every day at two o'clock in the afternoon
I later later came to rationalize all that away in Alistair Cook's marvelous writings
about the melting pot theory my visits to America these days are many and I seem to
be seeing a different attitude now in frontline troops in America there isn't that passion
for the flag there isn't that passion for America that we used to see back in the old
melting pot days is that something that is affecting America in terms of people not galvanizing
around some common theme that makes them united it's now fragmented a bit I think in terms
of all the issues that make up America is this a flaw that someone somehow has got a
rectify in terms of finding a common cause to to stand behind very interesting and I
also stood up and said the Pledge of Allegiance every day we didn't have to sing but we did
certainly said the Pledge of Allegiance I think there there are two responses one is
I actually think there's been a huge wave of back to of patriotism after 9 11 and we
heard last night the everybody suddenly wearing flags the national flag and I was actually
kind of I found that dissonant because I kept thinking this is an attack on you know 80
nations it's an attack on on something that is global not just the United States but the
American response was so patriotic and more among the younger generation than in my generation
certainly in the academy the students really felt strongly that this was an attack on what
America was about so I I think there's there's right now huge disaffection but overall if
I look at my students I see a tremendous patriotism the second issue and again that's why I wrote
the book in the way I did because I think you can appeal to these values but the second
issue which I think you get at which is important is we went from melting pot to multiculturalism
but I think we've swung back to to the mosaic which is less than multiculturalism it's not
everybody just does their own thing but it is a vision of a unified country that still
has much more room for the expression of different cultural traditions of different religions
so you know the idea that if you go to Indiana there's a Hindu temple or a mosque as well
as a synagogue and multiple churches or that you know African Americans celebrate Kwanzaa
you know my kids boy December's great you've got Hanukkah Kwanzaa and Christmas all in one
month I think that's very healthy and it was probably a needed corrective to a melting
pot that basically meant you all become Anglo-Saxon Protestants okay I'm told by Meredith that
there's a slight delay with the food so that means we have time for one or two more questions
I notice we might go with Rodin Dalrymple and then down to in red here on the right
Rodin Dalrymple University of Sydney what I've heard this morning on top of recent fairly
extensive travel in Europe and in the United States reinforce the something that has always
been my mind since I lived in Washington DC for several years in the 1980s and that is
the way in which the moralistic and tone and religiosity of a great deal of the expression
of American foreign policy has an adverse effect on its reception in the rest of the
world I mean that's extremely noticeable in Europe at present and there are indeed echoes
of it here now I understood it's easy to understand of course that American political
leaders feel that given the constituency they're speaking to at home they have to put everything
in terms of moral morality and religion and you talked about the religious aspect of it
but I think really that is an obstacle and it may well be a lasting obstacle to the recruitment
of others to the kind of things that American policy might be promoting it gets a very adverse
reaction in many quarters not just in Europe and perhaps least in Australia in some ways
but also in a lot of Asia I mean in Japan it's widely thought that most of that is hypocrisy
on the part of the United States and I suspect that much the same is the case in Southeast
Asia so that's a that's a rather sharp question in a way I don't mean it to be such but I
hope you could I think it's been absent from the discussion so far and it seems to be a
very important element in assessing the way the United States has been performing and
how it might perform in in a world leadership role so I address the question primarily to
Professor Slaughter but some of the things Alan said related to it too and if there's
time he might want to comment also.
So this brings me back actually to the first question I think there's no question that
the overtly religious framework of our current president has been deeply alienating it's
been deeply alienating to many Americans right who are sort of wait a minute you know even
religious Americans you know we don't particularly want a president who thinks he's talking to
God because his God may not be anybody else's God so the first thing I think that has to
happen is that the you're not going to get religion out of American politics but again
historically it's been respect for multiple religions it's been the notion that the president
has his faith but the Americans or her faith and you do have to have faith and an atheist
will never be elected at least not in my lifetime but that that's a very different thing than
imposing your faith on the country that instead we are a country that embraces all different
kinds of Christianity but also Islam and Hinduism and everything else which actually I think
is a more appealing view to many in the world that it's a pluralist a country of pluralist
faiths and a civic faith and I actually argue in my chapter on faith that enlightenment
faith or civic faith and religious faith at their best reinforce one another rather than
cutting against but the second response I have which probably going to be more tendentious
is I think that Europeans and maybe even Australians are in for a surprise I I know a good bit
of work on Europe looks at a coming religious revival not in the scale of the United States
and few places can do it quite as dramatically as we do but there is a lot there you know
in many quarters obviously among immigrants but also among youth who are feeling the emptiness
of relentless secular consumerism there's a big environmental movement but there's
a turn back and I talked to somebody last night who said you know Australia has a religious
right as well I think that in that way America having to negotiate this and figure out how
you do combine respect religion but maintain room for multiple religions will be a good
experience and it's a very positive experience when you're actually talking to Muslims when
you're talking to Muslims and I've taught many you know they they are more comfortable
with the role of religion in public life then either Europe or maybe Australia is so I I
think we should look down the road a bit and not assume that the past informs the present
in more secular parts of the world I'd love to hear your response on that no it's a boring
response because I agree with you that's fine as Rodin was asking the question I was thinking
the same sort of thing there is a way in which the the religiosity of American society doesn't
able it to engage with very large parts of the of the world with which the secular European
and and and even Australian ways of thought can't do the question is the way in which
that religiosity is expressed at government level I just had one last point the largest
Christian congregation and the fastest growing is in South Korea right it's pretty striking
and then all over Africa final comment from over here thank you Marina service from the
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade I just wanted to pose a question drawing on the comments
of Dr. Alan Gingel and reflecting back on the poll results we had yesterday just building
on the comments about Australian economic prosperity and loss of confidence in the US
over recent years I wondered to what extent the lowered the lower percentage of Australians
that look to the US as an exemplar of how to manage economic and cultural issues really
reflected more our own maturity as a society in those past years and the loss of confidence
in the US rather than in any fund than any fundamental difference of values with border
implications I just wanted to say that I'm going to formalize the doctor as soon as I
get back to the university because it's now stuck and I'm sorry Marina could you I didn't
don't think I got taken by the doctor he just couldn't hear what you were saying he thought
I've got a single bloody people my question really was drawing upon the results of the
US studies center poll that we had yesterday which reflect and certain conclusions were
drawn from that a lowered proportion of Australians looking to the US as an exemplar of how to
manage policy economic social and other policy and whether that really reflects our own confidence
as a society and loss of confidence by the US in those years rather than any fundamental
difference in values I think that's a very that's very good question and and I think
it's there there are two elements I think to what's happening now one is that there
is obviously a greater confidence in Australia now in the in the way we engage with the with
the world that than we've seen before in in the Low Institute polling you've been you've
been seeing that questions like you know can Australia succeed in a globalized world the
answer is is absolutely so so there is probably an element of of of that in the in the response
but I also think we'd be very foolish to underestimate the the impact of that the current
administration has had on views I mean you just need to look at polling from the from
pew and other and other agencies around the world to see that the the interesting thing
will be polling in two three years time we'll be able to measure then what's what sort of
whether the the Bush administration was simply a a blip in a in a long historical upward
trajectory or whether it represented something something new yes one more sentence the Americans
in Asia keep commenting on the cultural self confidence in Asia the there's a commercial
called be life confident and I think that is striking I think it's very good I hope other
countries like Australia have the confidence to assert their version of universal values
rather than the world seeing them as a projection of American values backed by American power
that's what we're going to wind up now it's a very brave person who stands between a crowd
and their lunch and I understand that the lunch is ready now I'm invoking Don Watson
but I just wanted to comment on the fact that I've really enjoyed hearing all these sentences
today do you recall him saying that he just you know forgive me for speaking in sentences
I think he said and there's been some gorgeous sentences today so please thank the speakers
and yourselves for a very interesting discussion.
