The Australian Financial Review Business Summit has become a reliable barometer of great changes. It debated the outbreak of global pandemic in 2020, the false dawn of 2021 before the delta variant struck hard, and now in 2022 the return of brute force as a currency of global politics.

Australia’s top intelligence official Andrew Shearer used the Summit to publicly share for the first time the grim assessments he has made to the federal cabinet: that authoritarian China wants global pre-eminence, starting with our neighbourhood, and that Vladimir Putin is painting himself into a dangerous corner in Ukraine.