Yes I've checked my contract and I can't get out of it so I'm going to continue with the quest. We're hoping to do one on scholarships which everyone tells us is the sure five things in state craft. Thank you White whose devil may care approach to giving his opinion on things I very much admired was convinced that scholarship programs was a place where overseas development assistants or ODA could have major influence. I am and I have been for a very long time very skeptical about the role of ODA in all its various forms as a way of building influence over the policies of other countries. So I've long long believed that the idea that these countries and their leaders will be more inclined to favor our interests over how they perceive their own country's interests because that's always the choice. They have their own perception of their own country's interests and do they shade those interests in order to support Australia's interests because they're grateful for the fact that we help them build a bridge or help to distribute medicines or gave them a governance program about the way they run their finance ministry. It just defies the simplest. It's one of those propositions which you'd have to be a government to believe it. I do think there's one way in which something that falls under the classic ODA umbrella can genuinely create influence and that is the effect on individuals in your target country or their experience of your country. I guess this is most dramatically demonstrated when people have been educated in a country for example, I mean this is purely anecdotal but I remember once when I was working for Hawkey in the midst of one of our periodical blues with Mahatia's government in Malaysia and I was having a very difficult conversation with my Malaysian counterpart at Mahatia's foreign policy office and we got to a sticky point and he smiled and said, you know, I did my degree at Adelaide. My daughter is doing her degree at the University of Queensland. My son is studying in WA. You can have that. It was just a very sort of artificially vivid but his personal experience of Australia, now it's a trivial issue, I mean in the Brown Sweeper history but I did think to myself, oh, educating people really makes a difference. I've always argued that if we really want to preserve our influence in the South-West Pacific, we just want to make sure there's as many possible future leaders are educated in Australia.

Susanna Patton is Director of the Southeast Asia

Program at the Louis Institute.