Lowy Institute Events

Russia’s war in Ukraine is now well into its second year. Ukraine’s much-foreshadowed counter-offensive is developing more slowly than expected. Meanwhile, Russia’s leadership was rocked by the recent failed mutiny by the private Wagner paramilitary group.

The Lowy Institute hosted Mick Ryan and Zoya Sheftalovich earlier in 2023 for an update on the Ukraine war. In July 2023, with Ukraine on the offensive and Russia’s internal political instability, we again hosted these two compelling experts to discuss how the war in Europe is evolving. The conversation was hosted by Executive Director Dr Michael Fullilove and included questions from the audience. 

Major General (Ret’d) Mick Ryan is a Nonresident Fellow at the Lowy Institute. His book, War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict, was published in 2022. 

Zoya Sheftalovich is a contributing editor for POLITICO, based in Sydney. She is a regular commentator on the Ukraine war for ABC News 24.

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What do Australians see as the key threats to the nation? How do they view China and the United States in the context of rising regional tensions? What do they think of AUKUS and nuclear-powered submarines? And how have attitudes to climate change and democracy evolved over time? 

Join us in Canberra unpack the findings of the 2023 Lowy Institute Poll. 

Now in its nineteenth year, the Lowy Institute’s flagship annual poll is the longest running and broadest survey of Australian public opinion on foreign policy and global events. It is the key resource for anyone seeking to understand how Australians see the world and their place in it.

Stephen Dziedzic, ABC foreign affairs reporter, will chair this discussion with Ryan Neelam, the author of the 2023 Lowy Institute Poll, Karen Middleton of The Saturday Paper, and Jennifer Hsu of the Lowy Institute.  

Ryan Neelam is Director of the Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program at the Lowy Institute and the author of the 2023 Lowy Institute Poll. Before joining the Institute, Ryan spent 14 years as an Australian diplomat including as Deputy Consul-General in Hong Kong, and at the Australian Mission to the UN. Ryan has contributed to policy development and international agreements on economic, climate change, human rights and security issues.

Karen Middleton is Chief Political Correspondent for The Saturday Paper and has been covering national and international affairs across print and broadcast media for more than 30 years. Karen covered the September 11 attacks from New York City and Washington DC, the ensuing war in Afghanistan, and has authored two books - An Unwinnable War - Australia in Afghanistan (2011), and biography of the now-prime minister, Albanese - Telling it Straight (2016). She is a former president of the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery and Churchill Fellow and, in 2020, was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Canberra. She is an experienced commentator in Australian and international media. 

Dr Jennifer Hsu is a Research Fellow and the Project Director of the Multiculturalism, Identity and Influence Project at the Lowy Institute. She is the author of the 2023 study Being Chinese in Australia: Public Opinion in Chinese Communities. After completing her PhD in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, she researched and taught development studies, political science and sociology in universities in North America and the United Kingdom. Jennifer is also a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Social Policy and Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

Stephen Dziedzic (moderator), is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s foreign affairs (Asia-Pacific) reporter, based in the Parliament House bureau. He covers foreign policy and Australia's relationship with countries in the Asia-Pacific region. Stephen has worked for the ABC since 2007 and spent five years covering federal politics.

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China’s remarkable economic rise has long been a key factor in global geopolitical discussions. But how soon and at what height will China’s economy peak? What are the implications for China’s ambitions in the world? 

For years, predictions suggested that China’s economic power would surpass that of the United States by the end of this decade. However, recent developments, backed by Lowy analysis, have challenged this assumption. 

In this event we unpacked the findings of original Lowy Institute research and explored the concept of ‘Peak China’ with the Lowy Institute’s Lead Economist Roland Rajah, Senior Fellow for East Asia Richard McGregor and Nonresident Fellow Dr Jenny Gordon. 

The event was moderated by Director of Research Hervé Lemahieu. Our panellists discussed the implications of this potential turning point and what it means for China's future prospects, as well as the repercussions it may have for the rest of the world. 

Roland Rajah is Lead Economist at the Lowy Institute and the Director of the Indo-Pacific Development Centre. A development economist by background, Roland has extensive experience working across both emerging Asia and the small island developing states of the Pacific. He has previously worked for the Asian Development Bank, Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), and the Reserve Bank of Australia. Roland is the co-author with Alyssa Leng of the influential Lowy Institute Analysis paper Revising down the rise of China. 

Richard McGregor is Senior Fellow for East Asia at the Lowy Institute. He is a former Beijing and Washington bureau chief for the Financial Times and the author of numerous books on East Asia including Xi Jinping: The Backlash (2019) and Asia’s Reckoning: China, Japan and the Fate of U.S. Power in the Pacific Century (2017). His 2010 book, The Party, on the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party, was translated into seven languages and chosen by the Asia Society and Mainichi Shimbun in Japan as their book of the year.  

Jenny Gordon is a Nonresident Fellow at the Lowy Institute and former Chief Economist at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Dr Gordon is a member of the Australian International Agricultural Research Centre’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Advisory Panel, and the Asian Development Bank Institute’s Advisory Committee. She is also an Honorary Professor at ANU's Centre for Social Research and Methods.

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Australia is home to 1.4 million people with Chinese ancestry. At a time of heightened concern about national security and foreign interference, how do Chinese-Australians see Australia and their place in it? How do Chinese-Australians consume news and information? And how do they view the wider world, including the growing geopolitical tensions in the region?
 
On 2 May the panel unpacked the findings of the 2023 Being Chinese in Australia: Public Opinion in Chinese Communities survey report with author and Lowy Institute Research Fellow Dr Jennifer Hsu, Jieh-Yung Lo and Yun Jiang. The event was chaired by Pablo Viñales.
 
Jennifer Hsu is a Research Fellow and the Project Director of the Multiculturalism, Identity and Influence Project at the Lowy Institute. Jennifer is also a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Social Policy and Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Her research expertise broadly covers state-society relations, state-NGO relations, the internationalisation of Chinese NGOs, civil society and the Chinese diaspora.
 
Jieh-Yung Lo is Founding Director of the Centre for Asian-Australian Leadership (CAAL) at the Australian National University. Jieh-Yung has worked in various public policy and project management roles and served in leadership positions across not-for-profit, entrepreneurship and government. He served two terms as a Councillor with the City of Monash including two years as Deputy Mayor.
 
Yun Jiang is the Australian Institute of International Affairs China Matters Fellow. She is formerly the co-founder and editor of China Neican, as well as a managing editor of the China Story blog at the Australian National University. She has published widely on China-related topics. She was previously a policy adviser in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury and the Department of Defence. 
 
Pablo Viñales is the Political Correspondent at SBS World News. Aside from federal politics, much of his work focuses on the changing geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific and the China–Australia relationship. 

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Australia’s strategic outlook on the Indo-Pacific is changing rapidly, as reflected by the recent AUKUS announcement, forthcoming Defence Strategic Review and membership of new regional minilateral groupings such as the Quad. These changes will have important implications for Australia’s relations with neighbouring countries in Southeast Asia, and especially Indonesia, highlighted by Jakarta’s mixed response to the AUKUS announcement in 2021. How widespread are concerns about AUKUS and Australian strategic policy more generally within Indonesia? Are the two countries experiencing a divergence in their strategic outlooks? And how should the two sides manage the risk of such a divergence in the years ahead? 

On Wednesday 26 April 2023, the Lowy Institute hosted an event at Old Parliament House, Canberra featuring Dr Evan A. Laksmana, Senior Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore, in conversation with Richard Maude of the Asia Society Policy Institute. The event was moderated by Susannah Patton, Southeast Asia Program Director at the Lowy Institute. 

Dr Evan A. Laksmana is a Senior Research Fellow with the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He is also a Lowy Institute Nonresident Fellow.

Richard Maude is Executive Director, Policy, and Senior Fellow of the Asia Society Policy Institute. He is a former Director-General of the Office of National Assessments and head of the whole-of-government taskforce which prepared the Australian Government’s 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper.

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On 19 April, the Lowy Institute hosted the launch of the 2023 Being Chinese in Australia: Public Opinion in Chinese Communities survey report with author and Lowy Institute Research Fellow Dr Jennifer Hsu, along with guests Samuel Yang and Lucy Du. The event was chaired by the Director of the Institute's Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program, Ryan Neelam.

Dr Jennifer Hsu is a Research Fellow and the Project Director of the Multiculturalism, Identity and Influence Project at the Lowy Institute. After completing her PhD in Development Studies at the University of Cambridge, she researched and taught development studies, political science and sociology in universities in North America and the United Kingdom. Jennifer is also a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Social Policy and Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. Her research expertise covers state-society relations, state-NGO relations, the internationalisation of Chinese NGOs, civil society and the Chinese diaspora and she has published widely in these areas.
 
Samuel Yang is a Chinese-Australian bilingual journalist and presenter. He is currently a co-host of China Tonight on ABC TV. He joined the ABC in 2018 and has previously worked as a business reporter and presenter in Sydney, and a bilingual reporter and producer in Melbourne. He has lived across the Asia-Pacific including in China, Singapore and New Zealand. His work has won the NSW Premier’s Multicultural Communications Public Interest Award and he was nominated for Young Journalist of the Year in 2020.
 
Lucy Du is the CEO of the Australia-China Young Professionals Initiative (ACYPI), the single largest young professionals organisation in the Australia-China space. She began her career in Canberra and then went on to work in China for one of Australia’s big four banks and later for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Shanghai. She is currently Head of Community at Belz Family & Associates, a global private assets investment platform for Asian and Australian investors. Lucy is bilingual in English and Chinese and has completed studies at the University of Melbourne, Australian National University and Tsinghua University.
 
Ryan Neelam is Director of the Public Opinion and Foreign Policy Program and is Project Lead on the annual flagship publication, the Lowy Institute Poll. Before joining the Institute, Ryan spent 14 years as an Australian diplomat including as Deputy Consul-General in Hong Kong, and at the Australian Mission to the UN. Ryan has contributed to policy development and international agreements on economic, climate change, human rights and security issues.

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With the announcement of Australia’s pathway towards nuclear-powered submarines, and the forthcoming release of the Government’s response to the Defence Strategic Review, this event offered the rare opportunity to hear from Australia’s most senior military officer about the international security environment and how Australia is responding to it. After his remarks, General Angus Campbell AO DSC spoke in conversation with the Lowy Institute's Executive Director Dr Michael Fullilove AM.

General Campbell joined the Australian Army in 1981, graduating from the Royal Military College, Duntroon in 1984. In 2005, he joined the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet as a First Assistant Secretary to head the Office of National Security and was subsequently promoted to Deputy Secretary and appointed to the position of Deputy National Security Adviser. Upon his return to the Australian Defence Force in early 2010, he was appointed to the rank of Major General. In 2015, he was appointed Chief of the Australian Army, and in 2018 appointed to command of the Australian Defence Force.

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The announcement of Australia’s preferred technology pathway for the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines has been described as the most significant shift in the country’s strategic outlook since the Second World War. Coupled with the forthcoming publication of the Defence Strategic Review, Australia’s national security environment is set for significant change. What is the future of Australian defence policy, Australia’s place in the region, and its relations with the United States and the United Kingdom? For this panel discussion, Sam Roggeveen, Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program, spoke with Dr Charles Edel, Dr Lavina Lee and Justin Burke about the big decisions shaping Australia’s national security policy.
 
Dr Charles Edel is the inaugural Australia Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC. He previously taught at the University of Sydney, where he was also a senior fellow at the United States Studies Centre. Prior to that, he was a professor of strategy and policy at the US Naval War College and served on the US Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff from 2015 to 2017.
 
Dr Lavina Lee is a senior lecturer in the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University in Sydney. She is a member of the Council of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and a nonresident fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney.
 
Justin Burke is the 2022 Thawley Scholar in International Relations at the Lowy Institute and Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). He is a nonresident fellow with the Institute for Security Policy at the University of Kiel in Germany. Justin is a PhD candidate in naval power at Macquarie University and was previously a journalist with The Australian and Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun.

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The inaugural FDC Pacific Lecture was given by the Prime Minister of Samoa, Fiamē Naomi Mataʻafa at Old Parliament House, Canberra on Monday 20 March 2023.

The Hon Fiamē Naomi Mataʻafa is Samoa’s seventh prime minister and the first woman to be elected to the role. She was also the country’s first female cabinet minister and deputy prime minister. As the leader of the Faʻatuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party, she became prime minister after elections in 2021. Prime Minister Fiamē was first elected to parliament in 1985 and was appointed to her first cabinet ministry in 1991, going on to serve in a range of portfolios including Education, Justice and Environment. From 2006 to 2012, she was the chair and pro-chancellor of the University of the South Pacific. 

The FDC Pacific Lecture has been established with the support of the Foundation for Development Cooperation, which has also established the FDC Pacific Fellowship in conjunction with the Lowy Institute.

The Prime Minister was introduced by the Australian Minister for International Development and the Pacific, Hon Pat Conroy MP. After her remarks, Prime Minister Fiamē spoke in conversation with the Lowy Institute's Executive Director, Dr Michael Fullilove AM.

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On 14 March 2023, Australian foreign policy expert and former Lowy Institute Executive Director Professor Michael Wesley launched his new book Helpem Fren: Australia and the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (MUP 2023). The book is the first comprehensive history of Australia’s RAMSI intervention, which was aimed at preventing the collapse of the Pacific Island state. Helpem Fren draws on still-classified official documents and more than 30 interviews to explore the motivations and dynamics behind the 14-year Pacific-wide mission — a project that cost more than $2 billion and involved thousands of soldiers, police and public servants from Australia and across the Pacific. RAMSI was remarkably successful in an age of disastrous interventions, yet its legacy has largely vanished from Australia’s public consciousness. Professor Wesley joined the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Islands Program Director Meg Keen, to discuss the challenges of interventions and development assistance in a Pacific that is more geopolitically contested than it has been for 70 years. 

Michael Wesley is Deputy Vice-Chancellor International and Professor of Politics at the University of Melbourne. His research and writing focus on Australian foreign policy and the international affairs of Asia and the Pacific. Previously, he was Dean of the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. He has also held positions as Executive Director of the Lowy Institute, Director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University, and Assistant Director-General for Transnational Issues at the Office of National Assessments. He has a PhD in International Relations from the University of St Andrews.

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