HIS EXCELLENCY MR NGUYEN XUAN PHUC - PRIME MINISTER OF THE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC OF VIETNAM: [TRANSLATION]
Friends from Australia and Vietnam.
First of all, on behalf of the Vietnamese Government and people I wish to warmly welcome Your Honourable the Prime Minister and the high level delegation of Australia to Vietnam for the APEC Economic Leaders Meeting.
And for your information, this is my home town, Your Honourable Prime Minister and for the past few days the Da Nang people are very much impressed when they saw you eating the Da Nang bread and talking to kids in the street. Very much impressed – thank you very much.
And I’m very glad that since we established the Enhanced Comprehensive Partnership, our bilateral relationship has been growing from strength to strength at both bilateral and multilateral frameworks. Especially recently, I received many Australian politicians and had very good meetings with them to discuss about the bilateral relationship.
Before this talk, I just had a brief talk with your Minister of Trade and we also agreed that Australia and Vietnam have been supporting each other effectively in many different forums, especially in TTP we’ve been supporting each other very well.
And Your Honourable Prime Minister, at this talk, we hope that we will be discussing concrete ways in which to take our relationship to the next level of the Strategic Partnership.
Allow me to introduce the members of my team today of the Office of the Government.
Senior Lieutenant General Nam who is the Deputy Chief of Staff, the Minister for Industry and Trade, my Assistant and the Minister for Science and technology, and the Vice Minister for Rural Development.
And I currently invite you to speak.
PRIME MINISTER: Thank you very much Prime Minister. You are clearly so delighted and so happy to be hosting APEC in your home town and I can see the warmth of the reception is as enthusiastic here with you, my old friend, as it was when we were enjoying the Banh Mi with Luke Nguyen and the children this morning.
And as Mr Anh saw last night, when we had a meeting of business leaders, Australian and Vietnamese business and government leaders, the depth of the relationship - cultural, commercial, economic – is so strong. There is so much innovation and partnership going on in the Australia-Vietnam relationship that it is absolutely right that we are elevating it to the Strategic Partnership, to the high status it deserves.