E&OE...........
Mr Chairman, Mr Speaker, Mr President, my parliamentary colleagues, your excellencies, ladies and gentlemen.
Confucius nominated 30 as the age at which a person became either mature or fully established, or both.
Using that measurement we can certainly say that the relationship between Australia and China is both mature and fully established.
This year we mark the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Australia and China. But in marking that important milestone in the relationship between our two people we should regard the relationship as being very much a work in progress because there is always a lot that can be done and a lot more that can be achieved.
Mr Chairman, we are delighted to welcome you and your wife as our guests to mark the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations. You last visited Australia in 1988 as Premier, a year of course that was very significant in the history of this country.
Successive Australian Governments have worked very hard to build the relationship over the last 30 years and we can look back on that time as being a period of great achievement. The most important achievement of course has been the building of personal people to people links between our two societies.
I am very fond, Mr Chairman, of pointing out that in Australia';s largest city Sydney it is the various dialects of Chinese which is the most widely spoken foreign language. A fact that many European hosts of mine on a recent visit to Europe found quite astonishing.
I take a very personal interest in this Mr Chairman because in my own constituency of Bennelong the enrolment includes more than 10 per cent of Australians of Chinese decent.
We have a very close education relationship with China and with 25,000 students from China expected to study in Australia this year, China is our largest education market.
The tourist market is growing at a very rapid rate and by the year 2010 it is estimated that more than one million Chinese people a year will visit our country.
The relations between our two countries will grow even closer as the occasion of the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 approaches.
We offer to you Mr Chairman and to Beijing and to the people of China our friendship and any help that you may ask for in relation to the staging of those games.
I remarked to you Mr Chairman over dinner that in the six and a half years that I have been Prime Minister of Australia there is no world leader I have met more frequently than your President Jiang Zemin.
The relationship between Australia and China is sound because it is built upon the important principles of mutual respect for each other and a recognition that societies that have different cultures and have different histories can nonetheless work together very closely if they understand those differences and they focus on the things that bring their two societies together.
My last visit to China was in May of this year, it focused very heavily on the negotiations then going on in relation to the contract for the supply of LNG.
We Australians were delighted at the decision taken by the authorities in China to award that contract, the largest ever trade agreement Australia has made with any country to the consortium from the North-West Shelf. We think your decision was wise and a decision that will contribute very greatly to the relationship between our two countries.
It was an important illustration of how much our two countries can work together and it was a reminder of how much we have in common.
And that visit was also important because I had the opportunity of addressing the cadres attending the Central School of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing and I understand that I was not only the first leader of a centre-right party in the Western world to addressing that gathering but indeed the first leader of any political party to address that gathering. It was a rare experience for me and it was a reminder of how two countries with different histories and different cultures can work together in a respectful way.
Mr Chairman, Madame, we welcome you, we hope you have a most enjoyable time in Australia. We wish you well and your country well, we value very deeply the relationship between our two societies. We have come a long way in 30 years, I am sure in 30 years time we will celebrate many more achievements and an even deeper and richer relationship between our two peoples.
Thank you.
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