Thank you very much Michael, Warren Truss, my parliamentary colleague, the Minister for Trade, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to thank all of you very much for the commitment of time that you've made to come to the earlier forum and also to tonight's dinner. As I look around the room and I glance at the guest list, it's a very representative gathering of the Australian business community and I am greatly heartened by that because APEC in Sydney in 2007, in many respects, will be the most significant international gathering of an economic kind that this country has ever had. And it is important that we make the best of it as Australians, and it's also important we place it properly in the context of the way in which our relations with the Asia-Pacific economic region are emerging.
APEC in its years of existence has gone through, not so much various iterations, but it's gone in and out of popularity with some of the member countries - particularly some of the larger ones - and I'm very happy to say that I came away from the meeting in Hanoi with a very strong belief of several things. The first and most important was a reaffirmed American commitment to APEC as being the major point of interaction between the United States and the countries of the Asia-Pacific region. I mention that because there has been some debate in the United States about whether the East Asia Summit or some other relationship with the countries of ASEAN might become the most important forum through which the United States interacted with nations of the region. But President Bush made it very plain, both in the Leaders' Retreats and also in the private discussions he had with me, and no doubt with other leaders, how much the Americans regarded APEC as being the major forum. Now that's important for the most obvious of all reasons, and that is the continuing significance and relevance of America as the major economic power in the region and indeed in the world.
The other encouraging thing to me was a greater willingness of the leaders of the economies of the 21 countries involved in APEC, to focus on some of those areas where the region could bring some particular value. And one of those of course was the interrelated subject of which I've spoken a great deal in recent times, of climate change and energy security. It's no accident of course that the AP6 association, which brings together five of the six members who are APEC countries, the only one which is a member of AP6 that's not in APEC is India, and of course at some time in the not too distant future the member countries of APEC will have to address the question of membership and that inevitably will involve some consideration of the position of India. But much of the discussion at the Leaders' Retreat did revolve around climate changes issues. And one of the enormous advantages of APEC gatherings is that although they are formally meetings of economic leaders, they do afford a tremendous opportunity for leaders to, and on a bilateral basis, to interact with each other, concerning some of the more pressing political and strategic issues of the time.
But as I look ahead to APEC in Sydney, and it's going to be in September, which is less than 12 months, it does provide all of us with the most obvious of opportunities to put our country on display. The reputation of Australia, given her economic performance over the last 10 or 15 years, and the energy and representation of the Australian business community in the different member countries of APEC, means to me that the visitors we will receive and the business battalions or groupings they will bring with them will arrive here with a great deal of enthusiasm and a great deal of interest in what our country has to offer.
I was tremendously impressed in so many of the bilateral discussions I had with the consciousness of Prime Ministers and Presidents and other leaders of the huge involvement of Australian business in the region. Michael mentioned some of the statistics and they are very impressive. And a gathering like APEC is again a colossal reminder to me as Prime Minister of Australia of just how crucial those major markets, such as Japan, and China and Korea are to, not only the Australian resource sector - although that bulks very large - but also to the business community more generally.
I was very touched, and I think that is the right word, by one of the experiences I had in Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon take your pick as to what you might call it. It was a graduation ceremony of RMIT International which is the only independent foreign university in Vietnam and I may not have the figures literally correct but I am sure I've got the proportions right in the space of three years, the students enrolled in that university have gone from something like 40 or 50 to two-and-a-half or three thousand and to learn of the courses being offered, the tremendous focus on business and commercial skills, the absolute focus on instruction being in English and the sense of commitment of those students and the Vietnamese middle class to a future aided and facilitated by an Australian educational institution was a great reminder of the opportunities that are available to not only to our resource sector, but also of course our service sector, and we are all very familiar of the opportunities that are there and I was greatly I suppose educated and illuminated by the fact that Vietnam, a country which has come a long way in a relatively short period of time, was very warmly embracing the involvement of this Australian educational institution.
I mention that to acknowledge the breadth of the opportunities that we will have in the years ahead in this region and in getting together the consultative groups here in Australia, I have been very keen to make sure that all of the sectors are represented - the mining industry, manufacturing, educational, legal and other professional services, they are all very comprehensibly represented.
I am as you know somebody who believes very strongly that Australia's international relations should not be narrowly focussed. I've always seen the Asia-Pacific region as being the prime area of interaction both economically and politically, but never without, never with prejudice to the relations we hold with other parts of the world and that remains my position today. But certainly APEC is a forceful reminder to me of the enormous value of the relationship we have and the enormous opportunities that are presented to our country in the years ahead through our interaction with these increasingly wealthy nations of our region and I never lose the opportunity of reminding, particularly business audiences that I speak to, that we are experiencing at the present time, an historic shift where the centre of gravity of the world's middle-class will permanently shift from Europe and North America to the nations of Asia, and it's an historic change, the biggest change in many respects, that's occurred of that character since the Industrial Revolution, and the good news that Australia is very close to that new centre of gravity and it's something that we can enjoy and relate to our great advantage without in any way lessening the important commercial and other links we have with other parts of the world.
So that's the attitude of mind I bring to not only the current relationship, but also the opportunities, the relationship offers to all of us in the years ahead and the focus in Sydney in 2007 is a very promising and optimistic one. We'll be talking a great deal about the issues we discussed in Hanoi, I mentioned to the smaller ABAC grouping earlier that we will be obviously focusing a great deal on matters relating to climate change and energy security which is of increasing relevance and importance to all of us and there is a great desire on the part of the Australian Government in cooperation with the business community of our country to make sure that we get these things right.
So that's why I am greatly heartened by the attendance here, I am greatly encouraged by the enthusiasm and commitment of the Australian business community, it's a marvellous opportunity to further reinforce our place in this part of the world and to re-affirm how much we have in common with the nations of APEC as we go forward in economic partnership. So ladies and gentlemen, again my warm thanks, I look forward to seeing a lot of you over the months ahead. I want to thank my colleagues Alexander Downer and Warren Truss for their contributions to your work. Mark Johnson who is chairing ABAC grouping for Australia, I promised him that one of the things we would do in Sydney was to improve some of the ambience of the dialogue between the economic leaders and the various business groupings and I think we'll be able to give effect to that, but to all of you thank you very much for coming and I think we are going to have a great and important gathering in Sydney in September of next year and I want all of you to be very much part of it. Thank you.
[ends]