University of Tasmania, Launceston: Asia Institute Tasmania
Speaker: Acting Consul-General, Janaline Oh
30 March 2017
Thank you for that introduction, hello everyone and can I begin by acknowledging the Leterrermairrener people, the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which this campus is built, and pay my respects to their elders past and present. I also pay my respects to other Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people present tonight.
Thank you Professor Chin, the University of Tasmania and the Asia Institute for allowing me to speak here.
I’ve been asked to speak about opportunity, so I will start with personal opportunity and move on to a more general theme.
I’m very pleased to see Australians, and particularly young Australians, take a direct interest in the role played the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and by the profession of diplomacy.
I myself have been a diplomat for many years - indeed, since last century - and I can honestly say that it has been a very rewarding career.
But to be honest, it's a career that found me, rather than other way around.
If you have read a little about my background, you will have noticed that, apart from studying public and international law at the University of Melbourne, I also have a Master of Arts in Modern and Medieval Slavonic Languages – so if you have any Russian or Byzantine icons to read, I’m your girl!
I entered the University of Cambridge on a maths bursary, supported by the Cambridge Commonwealth Trust, but soon discovered I was not as good at it as I thought at school.
These days career options for mathematicians are wide and varied: I could have been an investment banker or a financial analyst. In those days, however, we were led to believe that academic research was the only true career for a mathematician and only the very best would succeed. Sadly, I wasn’t one of them.
I was, however, brought up in a household that spoke many different languages - often within the same sentence. And I had a truly inspiring Russian teacher who not only taught us verb conjugations and nominal declensions but also took us to the Russian Orthodox Church in inner Melbourne for the Easter icon procession and cooked us delicious pirozhki, kulich and cyrnaya paska. For her, language, culture and history were inextricably intertwined.
So when I had the opportunity to learn Old Slavonic, obviously I leaped at it: by learning ancient languages, you begin to understand about the heritage of current day cultures.
Although my parents despaired that this would leave me unemployed after all it wasn’t medicine or law or accounting or any decent professional degree of the sort a good Chinese girl should get, my studies unexpectedly sat well with the career path I finally fell into.
For those of you still studying and uncertain about your career path, don’t stress: no learning is wasted - not even Church Slavonic.
From my own experience, and with whatever you are studying, I think it’s best to maintain a certain “tactical flexibility” about your future.
Being open to changes and challenges is especially important in such a fast-changing world environment.
Indeed, the one constant in the world today is change.
When I was at university I had no idea, for example, that I would sit behind the Australian flag at the United Nations negotiating the rules of implementation of the nowsuperseded Kyoto Protocol on climate change or shaping the Biosafety Protocol.
I never could have imagined that I would play a role in the development policies of the Pacific Islands: our closest neighbours.
And I certainly had no idea that for the past six months I would act as Australia’s ConsulGeneral in Hong Kong – representing my country in one of our top trade and investment partners.
There is no higher honour than representing your country: whether that be in sport, science, arts or culture, or, in my case, as the faceless bureaucrat behind the Australian flag at the UN.
And it is a great honour to take part in processes that seek to promote peace and prosperity for all our people.
These things are very much at the heart of what the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, DFAT, as we call it, does.
DFAT’s purpose is to make Australia stronger, safer and more prosperous.
We do this through promoting Australia’s interests internationally by contributing to global stability and economic growth, especially in our particular region.
And hopefully from this flows the benefits to you – to all of us.
Foreign policy is not just about getting along with other countries – at its heart it is about what we can do for you.
How do you benefit from policies we seek to implement at an international level – or as the title of this presentation says – how do we create new opportunities?
This is especially important given that for the past year the world’s media, and others, have been proclaiming the death of globalisation.
By globalisation, what we really mean is openness.
Openness to goods and services, to capital, skills and ideas from beyond our shores.
These are all facets of our foreign policy that have served Australia well and that I believe will continue to serve us - and you - well into the future.
On this front, we can’t ignore our particular region.
Still today many commentators ask whether Australia really is a part of Asia.
Despite our historical and still important links with Europe and America, our geography ties us closely to this region.
In 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India told the Australian Parliament that Australia lies at the cross-currents of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
We are unequivocally and proudly an Indo-Pacific nation.
The peace, stability and prosperity of this region always has been and will always be a top priority for us.
While our location provides a unique opportunity to be involved in the growth of the region, we shouldn't fall into the trap of thinking that simply because of our favourable geography, the spoils of Asia’s economic rise will fall to us and trade relations will continue to grow.
We have to work to create our own success.
We need to shape and reinforce the strong ties that we have built up in Asia.
A history of trade and migration in the region, to and from Australia, is one of the key features that has served to underpin important cultural and economic links.
I say “to and from” because, we often only focus on migrant arrivals and imports into Australia.
Some 85,000 Hong Kongers have migrated to Australia but in Hong Kong, we estimate there are around 100,000 resident Australians.
Even if we go back further in our history – back to the gold rush days of the 1850s – a large proportion of the thousands of Chinese who sought their fortunes here either came from or found their way here through Hong Kong.
It’s this close and long history, the personal, family and business connections over an extended period, that have combined to build a cultural and economic understanding that means that even with its relatively small population, Hong Kong is one of our leading trading partners.
Hong Kong is regarded as one of the most open economies in the world but, even with its renowned open business environment, Australia’s policy efforts, our commitment to open and free trade, have come into play.
We were keen supporters and advocated for Hong Kong’s role as a regional wine hub, which led in 2008 to the removal of duties on wine imports.
This has been spectacularly successful for Hong Kong – and for Australian winemakers.
Australian wine exports to Hong Kong have increased exponentially since 2008 and not only are we the second largest exporter of wine, but Australian wines command the highest price per litre – more than French wines, which happen to be the largest exporter by volume.
This has clearly benefitted Tasmanian wine producers including, in this region, Josef Chromy, whom I had the pleasure of visiting today.
Josef Chromy has easy, competitive access to the wine market in Hong Kong where many products are then reexported into Mainland China.
This is where the China Australia Free Trade Agreement, or ChAFTA, comes into play.
As entry barriers such as tariffs and duties into the Chinese market begin to disappear, Australian exporters will correspondingly have greater opportunities to engage with China’s fast-growing middle classes.
As the Josef Chromy experience shows, it’s not just big companies that benefit from open trade access to foreign markets. Indeed, the main beneficiaries of trade agreements are the small and medium-sized companies that don’t have the clout or resources to negotiate their own special deals with foreign governments.
The other local family business I was fortunate to visit today was Bridestowe Lavender Farm.
I probably don’t need to tell you here how Bobby the Bear managed to sniff out success in China, thanks to the social media presence of a Chinese model who a few years ago posted that she couldn’t sleep with without her new favourite bedtime companion.
Other celebrities followed, sparking incredible demand for this small lavender bear.
Now while it hasn't all been smooth sailing in terms of exports for Bobby by Bridestowe, the interest that those social media posts generated have helped drive an interest in tourism by Chinese travellers, to the benefit of the whole of Tasmania and particularly the Launceston region. Indeed, I learned today that, 10 years ago, Bridestowe employed 10 people. They now employ 65 people, principally because of their international customers.
ChAFTA is helping to drive these greater links between Australia and China by helping to ensure the competitiveness of our agricultural, resource, energy and manufacturing industries and by encouraging greater investment in Australia.
These in turn open up opportunities for Australian business, driving growth and creating jobs.
And there are further opportunities that we are seeking to capitalise on.
In Hong Kong, Austrade and Tourism Australia are currently putting together an investment delegation that will come to this part of Tasmania to look at how their investment capital can help local businesses to expand their opportunities and create jobs in light of the increasing numbers of tourists from the region.
As well as playing a vital role in China’s commercial interactions with the rest of the world, Hong Kong is integral to the smooth operation of trade and investment between Asian nations.
Our substantive relationship with Hong Kong stems from our long combined history but also because of the facility it provides for doing business.
Under the high degree of autonomy granted to Hong Kong, as a Special Administrative Region of China, Hong Kong agrees and signs its own economic and trade deals.
Hong Kong companies enjoy special access to China through agreements like the China Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Agreement – or CEPA – which gives favourable treatment to its manufacturers and service providers.
And Chinese companies use Hong Kong as the conduit to reach out to the rest of the world – using it as both a trade and investment base.
This is part and parcel of Hong Kong’s special status.
Hong Kong’s rule of law, based on the common law system, an independent judiciary and press freedom, make Hong Kong an attractive location from which and with which to do business.
It's the stability, predictability and transparency of this system which underpins Hong Kong’s continued success as an international business hub.
This policy, enshrined in Hong Kong’s Basic Law, of One Country, Two Systems - in which Hong Kong retains a capitalist economic system, the common law, and political and economic freedoms familiar in western democracies - is fundamental to Hong Kong’s economic success, and to its role as a channel for China’s financial transactions with the rest of the world.
In 2016, Hong Kong accounted for only 3 per cent of China’s GDP, compared with around 30 per cent in 1997, when Hong Kong returned from British colonial rule. But around 70 per cent of capital flows to and from Mainland China are channelled through Hong Kong. This is no accident.
One Country, Two Systems is the reason there is such a large Australian and international presence in Hong Kong. Hong Kong hosts the second largest concentration of expatriate Australians in the world, after the UK. It is our second largest federal polling booth, after London, taking more votes than any single polling station in Australia.
It is why, with a population of just seven million people, Hong Kong is Australia’s sixth largest source of foreign investment.
And it is why Hong Kong is Australia’s largest offshore business base. We estimate that around 600 Australian businesses, large and small, have a base in Hong Kong and up to 1200 more have representative offices there.
Openness and transparency - openness to trade, openness to people and openness to ideas - are what have fuelled Hong Kong’s success and have similarly underpinned Australia’s unbeaten economic performance over the past quarter of a century.
It’s no accident that Australia’s 26 years of uninterrupted economic growth has accompanied increasing openness to the rest of the world.
The ease with which goods, services and people can cross between countries has created new markets and helped to deliver more prosperity and wealth around the world and here in Australia.
The Prime Minister a few months ago launched a book by journalist and economist George Megalogenis.
In “Australia’s Second Chance” – Megalogenis argues that it has only been when we encouraged large-scale immigration and a policy of openness that we have been an economically successful nation.
Openness to trade and migration since the mid-1990s have led to median household incomes in Australia increasing by 50 per cent in the past 20 years. And I would add that the benefits of trade are not just about exports. Imports not only reduce costs to consumers, but also employ tens of thousands of Australians in jobs including logistics, transport, retail and the services that support the import trade.
But globalisation has come to carry negative connotations, and association with a feeling of dislocation in some segments of our community.
And openness to trade, as well as technological innovation, has left some people behind.
It is incumbent on governments to look after those people, and that is why Australia has had, since the 1980s, specific funding for programs to help workers who have lost jobs to imports to transition into new employment. But we should not confuse the need for domestic social and economic policy with trade policy.
Openness to the rest of world, and in particular Asia in more recent years, has benefitted us immensely.
The Prime Minister and other senior ministers have resisted the pressures towards greater introspection that we are seeing in Europe and the United States because they recognise that being open to the rest of the world is in our own best interests.
Full disclosure here - obviously I am personally deeply invested in Australia’s openness, being myself a product of it. My father was an original Colombo Plan scholar from Malaysia in the 1950s, and that is why I am here today, representing the Australian government.
One of the signature initiatives of the current Government is the New Colombo Plan.
I had the pleasure of meeting one of your own students, from UTAS here in Launceston, who is about to embark on a New Colombo Plan scholarship in Hong Kong.
We’re very familiar with the NCP program in Hong Kong as we were one of the four pilot locations.
And Hong Kong remains extremely popular with New Colombo Plan students.
This year we’ll have a dozen scholars and almost 250 students visit under the mobility program.
The Government backs this program because it understands that by giving young Australians the opportunity to gain a greater understanding of Asia, by opening yourselves to new experiences, cultures and ideas, we not only enhance your employability, but allow you to add to the greater well of knowledge that we as a nation have about our own region.
I strongly encourage you to participate in programs like the New Colombo Plan.
I know there’s a focus on scholarships and the study program but the feedback we have from students involved in the mobility program is also very positive.
Gaining first hand work experience in an Asian environment is proving to be invaluable for so many young Australians.
So I encourage you to seek out the kind of international engagement that will serve you well.
After all, it’s our future and our future opportunities as a country that will be in the hands of young people just like you.