PRIME MINISTER: Thank you very much Mr President and as the debate’s been going on, I will endeavour to be brief, although I have often said that the only statement from a politician that you can always rely on to be misleading is the opening remarks so I will be brief. But, I will do my best not to disappoint you.
The discussion today has focused, above all, on the importance of driving inclusive growth through trade, and through more open markets and, as you know, Australia strongly supports that. We have no doubt whatsoever that in the nature of the global economy, rapidly changing, expanding, and changing at a pace never seen before in human history.
We’ve talked about China's growth of course, often we talk about little else. But, that is a remarkable thing, 40 years ago China barely participating in the global economy, now the second largest, and no doubt in due course, to be the largest single national economy. These are momentous changes, and what we’ve seen in terms of technological change is equally momentous.
So, how do we respond to all of that? We respond to that by being agile, by recognising that we don't know precisely what the future holds, but we know that if we are flexible and best poised to respond to the opportunities as they arise, we are more likely to succeed than not. So trade, trade clearly is absolutely critical. A focus on services also is very critical and I agree with all of the speakers, which is pretty much all of the speakers, who’ve emphasised the importance of following in the direction of the TPP, I might say, to focus on trade in services.
I strongly agree with John Key's remark, the New Zealand Prime Minister’s remarks, about the value of taking a more pragmatic approach to global trade agreements, and he notes that Doha has been bogged down for 20 years and that there are a number of economies that don't want to play ball, and perhaps the show should just move on without them.
The plurilateral approach taken with the TPP is a good example of that and we should, with the TPP, be prepared to take on board other economies, and the Philippines being clearly a strong candidate, as indeed is Indonesia, and build a global trade arrangement from the bottom up. Because, suddenly trying to do it in one hit seems to be very hard, as John said, it’s been 20 years since the Uruguay round, so that’s not very encouraging.
Can I say to President Xi, how much I welcome his announcement that there will be a high-level forum on urbanisation next year? I can say, assuming we get an invitation, we will be a very enthusiastic participant in that.
This is a really gigantic opportunity for all of us. Urbanisation, as we heard from the ABAC presentation yesterday, is one of the big themes, the big transformative themes, and we’ve all got a lot to learn from each other, we’ve got to learn from each other's successes, and I daresay, each other's mistakes.
The financing of infrastructure is critical, again, the points that have been made before are absolutely right, we need to do a better job on financing urban infrastructure, both in developed countries like Australia and in developing markets.
We need to, and again, to quote the Chinese President, you said without a clear vision nothing can be accomplished, and that’s what my father-in-law would describe as a penetrating glimpse of the obvious. But, it is nonetheless something we need to repeat more often because the truth is we should judge all of our policies not by their ideological or theoretical purity, but by their outcomes.
And if our objective is to secure more investment in urban infrastructure and we are not getting it, we ‘ve got to say, what are the barriers to it? And issues relating to rule of law, certainty, the points that you made President Obama, are absolutely right. The reason the capital is going uphill is because there are not enough secure and safe investments in the developing world, and governments can, governments can deal with that. I was just proceeding through some of the other speakers, I’d just saying to the Prime Minister of Japan how much I appreciated his description of the commitment to continue economic reform in Japan.
And I think all of us were heartened to learn that the three arrows of ‘Abenomics’ includes Cupid's arrow as well, that's very encouraging. On that issue of population and demography, which is again, is one of the big trends that ABAC mentioned, and referring to what the remarks of the Chilean President, Michelle Bachelet, it is perfectly clear that, I mean, we can say women hold up half the sky in an ethical sense, in a moral sense and that’s true, but women are not going to be able to do that unless they are able to combine family and work.
And the reality is that if you look in the developed world, the countries with the higher birth rates are also those with the higher participation rates, and they are those that have good childcare and enable women to combine work and family, and of course increasingly, men to do that as well. That’s one of the reasons we are making significant reforms in childcare at the moment in Australia, we already have a good system, but to make the benefits and support more direct to that lower and lower middle income families, for precisely that reason.
So I would say, finally, that in terms of infrastructure and PPPs, public private partnerships, I think there is a powerful argument for a closer integration of APEC and G20’s work in that area. We are all pretty much, we are talking about pretty much the same objectives and I think there is, the themes are the same between the two conferences, and I think a lot of collaboration there is worthwhile.
And it would be good, I think for us, finally, on that note, to be able to identify what are the things, the reforms we need to do in each market to achieve greater private sector investment in infrastructure. Because, the gentleman from the IMF was absolutely right, the more equity invested in infrastructure the better. You want that capital locked in forever, so if the project goes bad, doesn't work, and sometimes they don't, the loss is felt by the investors, not by the taxpayers of the country concerned, and that there isn't some quick capital flight leaving the taxpayer holding the bag.
We should always, construction and business risk should, wherever possible, be allocated to the party's best able to mitigate it and that is rarely governments. So, when governments can provide the certainty, the regulatory and legal certainty, and eliminate the political risk, then we will find there is no shortage of capital to build the cities, the sustainable and liveable cities, that are so important in a world where, let's face it, the most valuable capital is human capital, and that humans, of course, want to live in, most of them nowadays want to live in cities, and they want to live in sustainable and liveable ones. So we have the opportunities to build them.