ASEAN-Australia Business Forum
I would like to thank very much the ASEAN Australia Business Forum for inviting me to speak with you today. I acknowledge my colleague here speaking as well, Anthony Bubalo, to talk to you this session about empowering the diaspora within ASEAN.
Of course, 2024 has been a huge year for the ASEAN Australia relationship since the special summit at the beginning of this year. That was, I can tell you, for the Australian Government, a big moment for us, and it was, from our perspective, a deeply successful opportunity to kick off a whole lot of work building deeper ties between Australia and our friends and partners in the region. At the special summit in March, we announced the establishment of the ASEAN Australia Center.
We're also continuing to implement the recommendations from Invested: Australia's Southeast Asia Economic Strategy to 2040 written by our Special Envoy for Southeast Asia and Australian senior private sector leader Nicholas Moore. Our Southeast Asia Business Exchange Program is supporting two-way trade and investment between Australia and the region. Ten senior business leaders have been appointed to facilitate greater commercial links between Australia and Southeast Asia and I'd like to acknowledge some of those leaders who are here today, including Nur Rahman and Tony Lombardo.
Technology Landing Pads have been established in Jakarta and in Ho Chi Minh City and Investment Deal Teams have been deployed across the region to develop and facilitate investment in commercial projects right around the ASEAN region. We've streamlined visa processes for Southeast Asian countries, particularly for business travelers and frequent travelers.
Although those concessions have not been extended to Myanmar, we remain deeply concerned by the worsening situation in Myanmar, and as a government, we continue to call upon the regime to implement its commitments under the ASEAN five-point consensus.
We're continuing to take forward the domestic ratification of the ASEAN, Australia, New Zealand Free Trade Agreement upgrade. It's a real privilege to participate in finalisation discussions of that trade agreement, which is very important to us here in Australia. I did a significant section of that in Siem Reap in Cambodia, very early, in my time as Assistant Minister for Trade. That agreement unlocks deeper and more modern opportunities for engagement in digital trade, in the mining industry, in education, for two-way investment, for finance, procurement and so on. And if you put all this together, it sounds like a lot of activity. We're targeting economic and personal relationships with our partners in ASEAN directly because we know how important those deeper ties with our region are for Australia's future.
Southeast Asia is a $5.2 trillion economy, a combined population of nearly 700 million people and somewhere - just symbolizing the youth and vitality of the region - somewhere between half and two thirds of those people are under the age of 35. I remember what it was like to be 35, it was pretty good, being 35. The Southeast Asian middle class, is already at least 190 million people [and] will only grow as we move into the 2030s and based on current projections.
ASEAN, as a bloc, is set to be the fourth largest economy in the world by 2040. Indonesia on its own, is likely to be the world's fifth largest economy. Australia already has strong, deep, and abiding personal and economic ties in the ASEAN region. More than 1.1 million Australians have cultural and family ties in Southeast Asia. 400,000 people with family history and links into the Philippines. 330,000 Australians who come from or have ancestry in Vietnam. 100,000 people with Thai background and the same for Indonesia. Substantial populations from Malaysia and Cambodia. And as everyone in this room knows, our great, great Southeast Asian diaspora is part of the fabric of every suburb of every Australian community, and it's a deeply ingrained part of Australian identity and Australian life.
We know great examples of great Australian success stories from Southeast Asia, Bao Hoang who in only 12 years has built an amazing franchise network of more than 125 Roll’d restaurants, across Australia, taking inspiration from his mum's amazing Vietnamese cooking.
But of course, in a competitive, fast evolving world, Australia can't just sit back if we want our economy to continue to grow.
What the Moore report pointed out is that even though Australia benefits from our amazing Southeast Asia diaspora, we need to do much more with our ASEAN relationships. Australia must build and support the amazing personal ties that we already have with these countries if we want to build strong economic and investment relationships and as Southeast Asian communities are a key asset for Australian business, as we approach the key challenge set out in Nicolas Moore's report, to lift Australian investment and business engagement in Asia, we must also lift Asia literacy in cultural and language terms in order to prepare Australia to more effectively engage with the business and investment opportunities in our region.
I, too, am disappointed to learn that there are fewer Australian School students studying Bahasa Indonesia in 2024 than in 1996. That does deserve attention from government, and it's reflected in a lower application of Australian students to languages, and particularly regional languages, across the board.
But Australian business can lead here too. Our Southeast Asian-Australian communities of first and second generation migrants with deep language and cultural literacy skills are underrepresented in business and in finance and the investment sectors recruiting young school and university graduates for those businesses, who have an aspiration to engage in the region is vital for enhancing equity, diversity and social inclusion, but it's also central if we want to build business capability. It's key that business identifies our region's investment trade and collaboration opportunities and recruits young people from our diaspora community to lead and engage in their efforts to capitalize upon those opportunities successfully in the region.
The Moore report gives Australia, in my view, the right framework, the right recommendations and the right approach to increasing Australia's two-way trade and investment in the region. Building on it, our Southeast Asia strategy seeks to ensure that both our regional partners and Australia maximize the potential for academic ties from now until 2040, and beyond. And it does that because that's in the commercial interests of firms in Australia and in the ASEAN countries. It does it because it's in the interests of workers for their firms to be engaging in export and investment opportunities across the region. But it's also in our joint interests. It's in our interest to ensure that the way that the economic and investment relations develop across the region is a dense mesh of interlocking relations between our countries that builds economic and national resilience, that strengthens our economies and make sure that together, that we are really enabled to meet the growing challenges of the 21st century.
As part of that, Australia's Southeast Asian diaspora is a key part, in my view, of our success and a key part of our future success. And it's an enormous opportunity in equity terms, enormous opportunity in cultural terms, but of course, it's going to make all of us so much stronger.
I look forward very much to the discussion in this morning's session and wish you all the very best for your participation and what looks like, from its agenda, and what I've already heard feedback from this morning section, like it's going to be a terrific couple of days.
Thank you, Francis, for your work on making this conference happen and for over a decade supporting this activity. I wish you the very best for the rest of the conference.
ENDS
