Beijing, China
E&OE…
Thanks very much Mr Chair, again.
Let me agree with what you've said and make the point that in Australia almost all of our jobs growth over the last five years has come within the small and medium firm sector, 1.4 million jobs.
Whilst we've lost some jobs in large heavy industry which is the story for most countries around here and gained some jobs in large industry, the real growth has come from the small enterprise sector and that is a universal story.
The second point is, of course, that you raise culture. The good news is we don't have to do much in relation to culture.
The common humanity, the common platforms are simply driving our young people. They believe they can be entrepreneurs and they are being entrepreneurs.
What we can do collectively is the combination of our domestic policies and our international collaboration.
I really want focus on the international collaboration but on our domestic policies there are three things that we're doing in relation to entrepreneurs and start-ups.
One, we have established new laws in relation to angel investors and early stage venture capital.
So, effectively slight tax preferment which is sending a message to international and domestic investors and it's providing a benefit.
Secondly, we've specifically created the incubator program to support new incubators, new start-up precincts both within universities and outside of universities and I think the most exciting is within universities and so that's a large part of our national focus for the next two years, there's a National University Precincts and Incubators Plan.
The third thing that we've done is we've brought, based on both the German and the US models where we have learnt from Germany and the United States and created growth centres in six priority areas, to emphasise the work of industry, universities and government together.
It's a smaller version of Fraunhofer but it is based on and learned upon the Fraunhofer and the US collaboration models.
I think the really interesting thing for us at this table though is how do we get capital to flow from Australia to invest in India and Chinese and Brazilian start-ups because our people can get returned from China to invest in Canadian and Singaporean and Thai and Australian start-ups?
So, that's the big breakthrough and I would suggest there are two things that we could look at as a group, one there was some language inserted into the draft yesterday.
I think it was an Australian proposal but it was broadly agreed, where this meeting in its communique emphasises the need to encourage and then to make easier the free flow of innovation capital across borders.
Now, each of us has to look at our own laws but the free flow of innovation capital across borders, that I think is a really powerful message, I think it's proposed at the moment for paragraph 14 of the draft communique but if we can agree on that, that's a powerful message.
The second thing is, I think, Mr Chairman, we could perhaps all work on a network of bilateral innovation investment agreements.
So as each of us is looking to have innovation agreements to encourage real-world delegations of Australian investors to be flowing to Indonesia or India, to Thailand or Singapore or others within the region and vice versa.
And that it may be that the Europeans are going to Saudi Arabia and Senegal, there are no boundaries of course.
But it's this notion of bilateral investment delegations where the receiving country is assisting with partners and with opportunities and the sending company is assisting with capital and mentors and that network, if we were to each agree to pursue that, I think, gives a way forward.
Thank you very much Mr Chairman.
(ENDS)