Mr MARLES (Corio—Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Defence) (09:01): Last week, Australia lost one of our very best. As our foreign minister has said, Allan Gyngell was quite simply the finest foreign policy mind in the country. Allan Gyngell did it all. I would like to start by acknowledging the members of Allan's family who are with us today: his son, Joe, and daughter-in-law, Catherine. Allan was a foreign policy practitioner, a member of the famed class of 1969, that intake to the department of foreign affairs which included Dennis Richardson—who is here with us today as well—Sandy Hollway; Bill Farmer; Ric Smith; and John Dauth. Together, this group of young men, from the very beginning of their careers, were comparing notes about Australia and our place in the world, and those notes really have become the backbone of the modern foreign policy and strategic thinking of our country. Allan began his diplomatic career serving in Myanmar in the early seventies and then in Singapore in the mid-seventies and in Washington in the early eighties. Had this career been entirely confined to the department of foreign affairs, it surely would have been one of the great diplomatic careers in our country's history. But Allan did so much more. He went to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and, from there, became an adviser to Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1993. When Prime Minister Keating famously said, 'We will prosper in this country with security in Asia, not from Asia,' a shining idea which has been a guide for governments since and is very much a guide for the Albanese government today, Allan was there. When Prime Minister Keating and President Suharto together signed the Australia-Indonesia security agreement, perhaps the high-water mark in the bilateral relationship with our closest Asian neighbour, Allan was there again, instrumental. In 2003, Allan took his experience as a diplomat and as a prime ministerial adviser and, with an endowment from Frank Lowy, helped establish the Lowy Institute as its inaugural executive director, a position that he held for six years. That the Lowy Institute today is the pre-eminent foreign policy think tank in the country has much to do with Allan Gyngell's legacy. But he contributed to others—to China Matters and, more recently, the Australian Institute of International Affairs, of which he was the president up until a month ago. For those of us who spend time thinking about foreign policy, security policy or defence policy, it's really hard to imagine an Australia without the Lowy Institute or the rich landscape of think tanks which toss around ideas, scrutinise government policy and sharpen our thinking, and that landscape is marked by Allan Gyngell more than by any other person. Allan was a commentator again recently with his podcast Australia in the World, which he did with Darren Lim: Darren the enthusiastic interrogator, Allan the serious—at times not so serious—expert. Together, with wit, with pith and, most importantly, in a way which was accessible, they invited an audience into a complex area of policy which is profoundly important for our country. Allan was an academic: he was an adjunct professor at the ANU Crawford School of Public Policy and later an honorary professor at the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific. He brought his academic rigour to the books that he wrote, which included Fear of Abandonment, published in 2017, a masterpiece—the definitive tome on Australian foreign policy. Speaking with Dennis Richardson over the last few days, Dennis observed that Allan was a diplomat, a think tanker, a commentator and an academic, any one of those a career in their own right, yet Allan did them all and he did them with excellence. And he did more. I first met Allan Gyngell when I was the Parliamentary Secretary for Pacific Island Affairs and Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs, more than a decade ago. Allan was the Director-General of the Office of National Assessments, brought in to do that role by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Allan was charged with taking our country's most sensitive information and interpreting it in a way which would illuminate the path ahead for policymakers. Ever since then, he has been a source of advice for me; for the foreign minister as well, I know; and for so many others who have done roles like ours. He has given that advice with enormous generosity and enormous humility and with insights which have had a profound impact on us all. In this way, he has shaped Australian statecraft. Last August we did a round table of think tanks down at Russell. It was really an introduction to the think tank community for the new government. It was brief—hard to get a point across in a moment like that—but the comment I remember, which, sadly, I can't repeat to you today, was the one that was made by Allan, which succinctly summed up the world in which we live today and the challenges we face. It was a gem of an idea which has stuck with me ever since. Allan was a passionate believer in dealing with the world as we find it, not as we might want it to be. Yelling at the world doesn't really advance our national interest in any way. He believed that ours was the task of navigating our country through international waters through the real world, not some fantasy world. It was that which meant Allan always believed that, whatever one's view of China, it is a country which has played and will continue to play a deeply significant role in Australia's future. With this in mind, he played a significant part in establishing China Matters, a think tank dedicated to raising awareness about China in all its forms. In recent times, the debate has been more shrill, and Allan was subject to an enormous amount of criticism in the popular press for his role in China Matters, criticism which was deeply unfair. I know that those who were closest to him urged him to take public issue with his critics, but Allan refused, saying that at the end of the day what matters is substance and that, if you have substance, the clamour will die away and people will get to see and hear words for what they are. And he was right: the clamour has died away, and his words still stand in all their prominence. Fear of Abandonment is 363 pages of distilled wisdom. Its last sentence describes exactly why foreign policy is so important for a country like Australia. Allan wrote: Everything Australia wants to accomplish as a nation depends on its capacity to understand the world outside its borders and respond effectively to it. Allan never saw foreign policy in terms of it being a passive survey of events around the globe; rather, it was a dynamic area of policy, an active pursuit of how we guide Australia through international waters. He said: Foreign policy is not just a government's response to events outside its borders, but also an effort to anticipate and shape them … Ultimately, Allan was optimistic about the way in which we have done our foreign policy and the way in which we would do it in the future. He wrote: I have argued in this book that the motivating force of Australia's international engagement has been fear of abandonment. For some, that will seem too timid and unheroic a motivation for a great country's foreign policy. But it has also been the driver of one of most consistent and commendable aspects of Australia's worldview—its rejection of isolationism; its conviction that Australia needs to be active in the world in order to shape it … These are mighty words, but they are words spoken quietly, because Allan never beat his own drum. In truth, everything Allan did was without ego, because Allan was a wonderful and a selfless human being. While his words may have been quiet, they are words which will endure, because they have about them a pure, ringing clarity which will outlive Allan but in truth will outlive all of us, such that in decades to come at some darker time there will be a person standing in this spot, right here, quoting the words of Allan Gyngell as a signpost for a better future for our country. Vale, Allan Gyngell.