When governments become large voters cannot exercise close oversight otherwise known as political power.

As they say one thing led to another and ultimately the British and Irish governments asked me to serve as chairman of the peace negotiations which ironically began six years ago this week.

I came here as a practical man to talk not simply on the question of peace and war but to treat another question which is of hardly less importance - the enormous and burdensome standing armaments which it is the practice of modern Governments to sustain in time of peace.

It is not uncommon in modern times to see governments straining every nerve to keep the peace and the people whom they represent with patriotic enthusiasm and resentment over real or fancied wrongs urging them forward to war.

I think peace should be done not only among governments but among people. It was impossible before the Facebook.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.

If terror groups are to be defeated it is national governments that will have to do so. In nations like India governments will have to call on the patriotism of citizens to fight the terrorists. In a nation like Pakistan the government will have to be persuaded to deal with those in their midst who are complicit.

There is a basic lesson on financial crises that governments tend to wait too long underestimate the risks want to do too little. And it ultimately gets away from them and they end up spending more money causing much more damage to the economy.

The church's teaching on marriage is unequivocal it is uniquely the union of a man and a woman and it is wrong that governments politicians or parliaments should seek to alter or destroy that reality.

Provincial governments in Canada have terminated the positions of marriage commissioners who have for personal religious convictions not performed same sex marriages. It has happened in Saskatchewan.

I also urge the Obama administration - both on its own and in cooperation with other responsible governments around the world - to use all legal means necessary to shut down WikiLeaks before it can do more damage by releasing additional cables. WikiLeaks' activities represent a shared threat to collective international security.

Well it's a - I don't want to disappoint you but it's a time worn tradition of Australian Governments over many years not to get into any discussion about that aspect of intelligence matters.

When our governments want to sell us a course of action they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images devious and prejudicial language dubious linkages weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks.'

The hope of Internet anarchists was that repressive governments would have only two options: accept the Internet with its limitless possibilities of spreading information or restrict Internet access to the ruling elite and turn your back on the 21st century as North Korea has done.

Governments that use violence to stop democratic development will not earn themselves respite forever. They will pay an increasingly high price for actions which they can no longer hide from the world with ease and will find themselves on the wrong side of history.

The history of the last century shows as we shall see later that the advice given to governments by bankers like the advice they gave to industrialists was consistently good for bankers but was often disastrous for governments businessmen and the people generally.

I do not think it is an exaggeration to say history is largely a history of inflation usually inflations engineered by governments for the gain of governments.