Today is an historic day for the Coalition. Today, our Assembly approved a resolution and an amendment to our laws which officially makes the South Pacific a Defender region and, as Delegate, I had the great personal privilege of applying the Defender tag to the region.

For the best part of three years, TSP has been Defender-leaning in the majority of its military and foreign affairs decisions, but we held back on anything more concrete than that for a number of reasons. We have a responsibility to the new players who start the game in our region. We have a responsibility to the gameplay community at large to maintain a certain balance of activity. Both of these things meant that the time was not yet right, but there was an additional barrier, that of public perception and the reputation Defenderism had gained over a period of years, both owing to raider PR and a few bad actors within Defenderism itself. To be called a 'fenda' was to be labelled, counter-intuitively, as the bogeyman of NationStates.

The times have moved on and we now have an opportunity to offer exciting levels of activity to new players, restore the balance of military gameplay, and clear the name of defenders across NS by wearing the Defender tag with pride within the context of our existing values of freedom and liberal democracy. We will stand beside our allies the Rejected Realms in working to unite Defenderdom and revitalise both the Defender ideology and military gameplay itself and here too we have an opportunity, not to be lead by some outside influence, alien to the South Pacific and its values, but to lead by example in defending regions according to those values.

I'm not a military gameplay person myself, but I am wholeheartedly in favour of the diverse range of opportunities NationStates presents to players and the communities that arise from and within those opportunities. It is for this reason that I have stayed with the South Pacific and am proud to call it my home, and for this reason, too, that I have personally identified with the ideology of Defenderism since I first started the game. I believe that the communities we create in this game are real and that, so long as they are not mere safehouses for hatred, they deserve protection and whilst I understand the fun of raiding and that military gameplay wouldn't exist at all without it, there will always be those who see vulnerable communities only as targets. It is for the sake of those communities that I'm proud to see the South Pacific rallying behind a truly South Pacifican Defenderism and, though my term will soon end, I'm more proud than ever to be this region's Delegate.