Members of Parliament, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.
Tonight in this Great Hall of our Parliament, we honour a respected leader, a great friend and as was said by both myself and the Opposition Leader earlier today, our partner in peace and prosperity – Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan.
I welcome you Sir, I welcome Mrs Akie Abe, I welcome the large, the extraordinarily influential delegation of business leaders that you have brought with you from your country. I thought I had taken a very large and impressive business delegation to Japan, but Prime Minister, your business delegation has trumped mine.
But I do particularly wish to acknowledge and thank all of those business leaders that have travelled from Japan to Australia as part of this trip, just as I thank again those business leaders who travelled from Australia to Japan as part of my trip in April.
We should never underestimate the length and the strength of the business relationship between Australia and Japan. Mitsui have been here for as long as the Commonwealth existed. Mitsui first came in 1901; Mitsubishi have been here since 1920. There are very few Australian businesses that have been as long in this country as Mitsui and Mitsubishi.
You trade when you want something, you invest when you trust someone, and these great Japanese business houses have been investing in this country for generations. Based on the total investment figures, after the United States and the United Kingdom, no one trusts Australia more than Japan – and I want to say to you Prime Minister that trust is amply reciprocated.
On behalf of every Member of Parliament and, I’m sure, on behalf of every Australian, I congratulate you, Sir, for your heartfelt and moving address to our Parliament this morning and thank you for the talks we’ve had this afternoon. They have had the candour and comprehensiveness that befits our special relationship.
You said this morning that today marks the birthday of our special relationship. May I add in the same spirit, I hope today marks the death of old fashioned attitudes about Japan that owe everything to the 1930s and nothing to the modern Japan – the great modern Japan; the great peaceful, modern Japan of today.
Of course, this visit occurs very close to the anniversary of the signing of the 1957 Commerce Agreement which your own grandfather, Prime Minister Kishi, negotiated with Australia’s Prime Minister Menzies.
I was musing on the life and times of Prime Minister Menzies. He lost the prime ministership back in 1941 – only to regain it some years later – and went on to become arguably our greatest prime minister. Perhaps there is an omen here for our guest of honour!
Of course, Prime Ministers Menzies and Kishi were men of vision. They refused to be prisoners of the past. They chose to see the good in each other’s countries. As Sir Robert put it, “we all need friends with common interests and common ideals”.
The agreement they signed, all those years ago, profoundly changed our countries. But for the opening that was established then; but for the trust which swiftly developed from that time, there would be no iron ore industry in this country as we know it, there would be no coal industry as we know it in Australia and there would be little gas industry as we know it in Australia.
In April, I saw the impressive modern infrastructure of Japan, much of it built with Australian iron ore.
Tomorrow, it will be my pleasure to show Prime Minister Abe the Pilbara, where the iron ore that has built so much of modern Japan originated.
And of course, earlier today Prime Minister Abe and I signed the Japan-Australia Economic Partnership Agreement which will bring our countries even closer together. I thank Trade Minister Robb who has been indefatigable and tireless in promoting freer trade.
Much of the credit, though, for pushing this agreement to its conclusion, seven long years after negotiations first began, belongs of course to Prime Minister Abe himself. You, Sir, started the negotiations with Prime Minister Howard and now you have finished what you began – and Australia is the beneficiary of Japan’s first comprehensive free trade deal with a major economy.
This will be good for Japan, it will be good for Australia, and it will be good for the wider world because freer trade means more jobs everywhere and lower prices for everyone.
I should also say again tonight how much Australia welcomes Japan’s decision to contribute more to the international peace and stability on which everyone’s prosperity depends. We want Japan to take its rightful place in the community of nations.
We also thank you, Prime Minister, for your embrace of the New Colombo Plan, which I launched during my visit to Japan in April. More than 400 Australian undergraduates will shortly be studying in Japan as part of this initiative.
And I’m pleased that we have with us tonight Mr Jason Emmanuelle, the 2014 Kishi Fellow – the highest award for study….yes, Jason has won the Kishi Fellowship which is the highest award for study in Japan under the New Colombo Plan and he will go onto study linguistics at Osaka University.
Jason and the other New Colombo Plan students who have joined us this evening will help to build an even closer relationship between Japan and Australia in the years and decades to come.
Mr friends, when Prime Minister Menzies visited Japan in 1957 he said that we had “made up our minds to be friends” and he went on to say “that we will stand together to protect the things that matter to us.”
Well almost six decades later, that friendship has grown and grown. It started because we discovered a common interest and continued because we discovered everything else that we had in common: particularly a yearning for justice, freedom and peace.
We trust each other in a way that very, very few nations do. Trust, trust – that is the foundation of the special relationship that we celebrate tonight.
Thank you.
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