Thank you very much, it's great to be here with Lucy. London is very familiar territory for us as indeed is the United Kingdom. We were married in the United Kingdom in 1980, shortly before one Theresa Brazier married Philip May. They were very good friends of ours in Oxford, so we've known them for 40 years and we have had, as you all have, the experience of the extraordinary closeness between Australia and the United Kingdom. Australians and Brits move from one country to the other and have done for over 200 years with enormous ease and enormous comfort.
There is nowhere in the world where Australians feel more at home than the United Kingdom. We have an extraordinary shared values, shared history, shared family. I mean as Julie knows coming from Perth but born in Adelaide, of course. We have about a quarter of Australians have direct descendants, sorry over half of Australians I should say, are direct descendants from the United Kingdom, it's a history which has evolved.
It was back in 1948 Menzies said, "The boundaries of Britain are not on the Kentish coast but at Invercargill and Cape York." This is Invercargill, New Zealand he was talking about. Alex Downer, our High Commissioner, remembers Bob Menzies very well.
It was a different world. But Australians saw themselves as being British in another geography and that of course, all of those political realities, changed. The High Court quite a few years ago, Julie, decided that people who were citizens of the United Kingdom were foreigners for the purpose of the Constitution.
This lay sleeping for many decades under the pavement of Australian politics and then for some reason known to others sprang out last year and we now got to the point where about 15 percent of the Senate have found their way onto new careers and a number of members of the House Representatives as well. So these are these are all things that would have amazed the founders of our Constitution.
But the reality is all of that you could not find two countries more close in every respect. Family, culture, history and values. You know Australia was the sole country, outside of NATO and the EU, that expelled Russian diplomats in response to the shocking nerve agent attack in Salisbury, here on British soil.
We recognize as Prime Minister May does, that we must show absolute solidarity in the face of lawlessness. You know the only thing that enables the prosperity that we've enjoyed ever since the Second World War. The extraordinary growth around the world particularly in our region has been the maintenance of the rule of law. With fluctuations and imperfections of course.
But that foundation of the enforcement of the principle that might is not right, that respect for the rule of law, respect for the rights of small countries, as Lee Kuan Yew would have described them, as the shrimps and the little fish not being able to be gobbled up by the big fish at their whim. That is what has enabled so much progress and they're the values of the law and the rule of law both domestically and internationally that we stand for. So, so much together.
Now what of the future? In a post Brexit environment we see even greater opportunities for trade and investment between the United Kingdom and Australia.
The United Kingdom will perforce have to reach out ever more widely to the rest of the world. I was talking to Liam Fox only yesterday about the very keen interest he has and his government has in joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Now that that was a singular diplomatic success on our part and part of Japan, with whom we worked very closely.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, of course, looked like it was an absolute dead duck after the United States pulled out. And in fact many people who claim to be experts in the field said it was. Newspaper columnists mostly, and our political opponents - but we stuck with it and so we have a Trans-Pacific Partnership and we have one country after another interested in rejoining it.
There are many people in the United States that would like to see America come back into the TPP. But the truth is the Americans would not have an option to do so had we not kept it alive. If we'd allowed the TPP to fall by the wayside.
If I had taken Mr Shorten's advice, it's always a mistake - and I say this as a former opposition leader too - it is very rarely a good idea for Prime Ministers to take the advice of their opponents and on this occasion it would have been particularly unwise. But we kept that deal alive and now you can see the strong interest in others joining it and of course it's delivering great benefits for Australia.
Look the reality is we are enjoying, at the moment in Australia, very strong jobs growth, very strong investment growth. We do not accept the lure of protectionism. We believe that protectionism is not a ladder to get you out of the low growth trap but in fact a great big shovel to dig it a lot deeper. And we know that the strong jobs growth we're enjoying in Australia is in large measure because of trade and we do everything we can to open up more markets for more Australians to invest, to trade to export, to do all things that you're doing.
Now Theresa May and her government share that vision. She, in the wake of Brexit, wants Britain to be even more global, even more open to trade. To once again become a nation that looks to the whole world and not just to Europe. Now that's a bold vision and a courageous decision taken by the British people to leave the European Union. But I believe it offers enormous opportunities for Australia as well.
So I just want to congratulate you all for the work you're doing in the UK. It is as close a relationship as you could possibly imagine and just in dollar terms think about the relative size of our two economies. Think of this, the UK has over half a billion dollars of investment in Australia. We have over $300 billion invested in the UK.
So that's not quite parity, but you can see that Australians proportionately have more invested in the UK than UK has invested in Australia. And that speaks for the confidence we have in the UK. The familiarity we have, the trust we have in the rule of law here and the legal system, of course one that not so long ago that if you're qualified to practice law in the United Kingdom you could practice law in Australia and vice versa.
Well the spate of legislation in both countries over the last 30 or 40 years has changed that. But nonetheless our systems could not be closer.
So thank you. Congratulations on the work you're doing. I believe that whatever the merits of Brexit may be, in the UK, and that's a domestic debate here, I think it offers greater opportunities for Australia in the UK than ever and I can assure you that we will do everything we can to enable the UK to enter into the most favourable open, to quote President Trump, fair and reciprocal, trade deal between Australia and the UK.
We want an absolute level playing field. But why wouldn't we? Because we think, by and large, as long as there's a level playing field we can always be competitive with the Poms. So thank you very much and congratulations.