It's always good to leave a job while you're still enjoying it. After almost eight years, today is my last day as director of the International Security Program at the Lowy Institute.
I am proud to have contributed a substantial part of my working life to the Institute's development as a force to be reckoned with in foreign and security policy debates, whether in Australia, its Indo-Pacific region or globally. In turn, I am grateful for the privilege of having been part of a powerhouse of ideas, dialogue and policy entrepreneurship.
From next week, my foremost professional loyalty will be elsewhere, as I take up the post of Head of the National Security College at the Australian National University. My new mission will be very much about helping shape an inclusive and contemporary approach to Australia's security and foreign policy challenges.
I will remain affiliated with Lowy as a nonresident fellow, and I won't forget where I came from. A certain sandstone building on Bligh St in Sydney will always seem to me the forge where I finished a long apprenticeship – across diplomacy, intelligence analysis, journalism and academia. It has played a formative role in my vision of what a policy think tank can and should be.
It's impossible now to imagine the Australian foreign and security policy scene without the Lowy Institute. But the Institute is just 11 years old, and it wasn't always thus.
Lowy has played, and will continue to play, an exceptional bridging role between the realms of politics, official policymaking, media and academia. For too long, these were parallel domains in Australia, often characterised by a lack of understanding or even of respect for one another's way of making sense of a confusing world. For a country of Australia's size, and a democracy, this was never a sustainable or constructive state of affairs. [fold]
In 2015, as Australia comes to terms with a world of increasing uncertainty, complexity and strategic risk, the need for policy communication and innovative thinking across the old boundaries of politics, bureaucracy, scholarship and journalism is greater than ever. Lowy, the National Security College and others in Australia's healthily expanding think tank scene will all have their parts to play.
The unique vantage point of the Lowy Institute – offering insights into business, media and wider community attitudes – has sharpened my sense of Australia's national interests and how they need to be protected and advanced.
My time at Lowy also leaves me with a rich trove of memories – illuminating dialogues with foreign counterparts, energetic debates on tough strategic problems (including on this excellent blog), fascinating research excursions, times when governments listened and times when they did not, rewarding moments of insight, and frustrating illustrations of the obstacles to good policy.
In particular, I have benefited from having such a strong platform to help advance Australia's understanding of its fast-changing Indo-Pacific region, and to encourage a sensible constellation of strategic relations with India, China, Japan, Indonesia and other regional powers as well as a revitalised and properly-explained alliance with the US.
In all of this, I am especially fortunate to have collaborated with and learned from so many talented colleagues. They range from wise veterans of the craft through to a successor generation of Australian strategic analysts, whose skills and interest I have been proud to encourage and cultivate. I thank them all.