Andrew Leigh

REMARKS AT ASIALINK YOUNG LEADERS PROGRAM

AsiaLink Leaders Program
Thursday 25 July 2024

Thank you, Sarah. I want to begin by acknowledging the meeting of traditional lands, the Ngunnawal people. I want to acknowledge the First Nations people present today, and commend AsiaLink for your engagement with First Nations stories. I love that conception of Noel Pearson, that the story of Australia can be thought of as the confluence of three rivers: our indigenous story, the European settlement, which has given us so many of our institutions, and; the multicultural story, which is at the heart of what AsiaLink does.

My very first memory at the age of two is a still image in Sarawak in Malaysia. We were there living at the museum in Sarawak because my father was extending his research looking at links between government and business in Malaysia. From ages five to eight I lived in Indonesia - in Jakarta and in Banda Aceh - where for a time I attended a local school, until my mother realized that schooling in Banda Aceh in the late 1970s largely consisted of the Indonesian government having us sing nation-building songs, so all the children would think of themselves as Indonesian first and Acehnese second.

By the time I got to primary school back in Australia, we were asked to do a history project, and we could do anything we liked. Some of my classmates chose to interview a grandparent. Others told the story of how the Holden motor vehicle had come to be. I did a project on the 1965 killings of communist sympathisers, interviewing friends of my family who had who had witnessed some of the horrors. I'm not quite sure what my teacher made of the project, but it did reflect the fact that the household I grew up in was one where my parents just encouraged us to think of ourselves as being part of the region. And I think for me, that is in the essence of Australia's strength, where we don't just ensure that we have strong local institutions, but we also play a part in engaging in the region. This was at the heart of some of those who worked in the decades to improve Australian institutions and improve our engagement with the region. Jamie Mackie, an academic at ANU, wrote ‘Control or Colour Bar?’, one of the key documents which was seminal in seeing the end of the White Australia Policy.

My father, Michael Leigh, who I mentioned before, when he was a student at Melbourne University, participated in protests against the White Australia Policy. He wanted to join DFAT, and had it confirmed that ASIO’s record keeping was quite good when in his DFAT interview, the very first question was, ‘if you were posted overseas, how would you defend Australia's White Australia Policy?’ He didn't get the job.

At the very same time as those academics were working to get rid of the White Australia Policy, they were also working to improve Australia's engagement with the region. Australia was one of the first to recognize a newly independent Indonesia, and it was another young academic Herb Feith who helped to set up Australia's overseas volunteering program. In his early 20s, Herb wrote to both Suharto and Menzies, proposing that an exchange scheme be set up, and extraordinarily, the Australian government agreed. The conditions of that that exchange scheme were that Australians would work on a local wage. Many of the early volunteers worked side-by-side worked side by side with officials in Indonesia's ministries, helping to build the institutions of the newly independent nation. By reaching out into the region, by engaging with the region, we ensure we benefit Australia, but we also benefited our neighbours.

You see this in the story of Australia's prosperity. Australia has had periods over the last 250 years in which we've been more open, in which we've been more closed, and without doubt, the periods of greatest openness have also been the periods of greatest prosperity. In the late 1800s Australia had an openness to immigration, an openness to trade and an openness to foreign investment, and at that time, we had the highest wages in the world. Workers in Sydney earned more than their counterparts in places like London and Chicago. Foreign capital and new ideas flowed in through migrants and through the trade, and prosperity followed. We saw too in the interwar years in which Australia followed the example of the Smoot Hawley tariffs in the United States, in which we put up the tariff barriers, made it harder for people to move to Australia, pushed back on foreign investment. In those decades, Australia slipped behind much of the rest of the world. The period of the closed economy is also a period in which living standards didn't grow as much as the rest of the world.

Then we saw from the 1970s and 1980s an opening up again. Following the election of the Whitlam Government, the last vestiges of the White Australia policy were removed. Gough Whitlam, in the stroke of a pen, cut Australian tariffs by 25% in 1973 to be followed by substantial tariff cuts under the Hawke government in 1988 and 1991. What's critical about those tariff cuts is they weren't done in exchange for other countries cutting their tariffs. They were what economists call unilateral tariff cuts. The great Cambridge economist Joan Robinson, who probably should have been the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, once said, it makes sense to take the rocks out of your own harbors, even if other countries don't take the rocks out of their harbors. That was exactly what Australia did.

We understood that by bringing down those tariff barriers, we ensured that Australians got to buy cheaper goods. We changed the price of a pair of school shoes. Suddenly, school, shoes and kids’ pyjamas were much more affordable for working families. But at the same time, reducing tariffs improved competition. We saw Australian firms having to work hard as they competed, not just against the best firms in the nation, but against the best firms in the world. One of the things that Gough Whitlam always thought was essential about the tariff cuts is that they provided a form of assistance to the region. That if we were to be good citizens in the region, he felt we needed to be open to trade with the region.

Fast forward to today, the Australian economy is one of the most engaged in the world. We have an economy where imports and exports each make up about a fifth of total GDP, in which we have increasingly specialized on the things we do best, advanced food manufacturing, education as, of course, exemplified by AsiaLink, financial services, healthcare services, and we've imported goods where other countries have their own comparative advantage. This has been to the benefit of Australia, but also to the benefit of other countries in the region.

We've opened ourselves up to migrants too. Now in Australia, a quarter of us are born overseas, and a half have a parent who was born overseas. That includes my three children, given that my wife is born overseas, and that has meant that we've gotten not only a demographic dividend, but also an intellectual dividend by bringing in migrants who present fresh ideas, new perspectives, who are able to say, ‘in Cambodia, here's how we do it’, or ‘this is the approach we take in Malaysia’. These new perspectives enrich Australia. We've also seen the benefits of foreign investment, accounting for about one dollar in nine of total investment in Australia. Foreign investment allows us to build more factories, to build more roads, to build more public transport networks, and crucially, right now, to build more solar farms. It brings not only dollars, but also know-how as foreign investors help to raise the standards of the local business community.

An international perspective really has been a hallmark of our government. Since coming to office in May 2022 there have been 104 visits to 16 Asian countries by Australian Government ministers. The Foreign Minister has visited every ASEAN nation except Myanmar since coming to office and visited China twice.

That personal engagement really matters. My advisor Frances Kitt and I have just returned from two days in Manila where we attended Asian Development Bank meetings and met with officials from the Philippines Competition Commission. There is a strong relationship between the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Philippines Competition Commission. They’re engaging to ensure that both economies are as competitive as they can be. The upgraded strategic partnership with the Philippines has seen increased educational engagement, increased business-to-business links, and increased strategic engagement through the region. This is just one example of one country in the region.

It's vital that organizations like AsiaLink and that each of us are equipped to point out the benefits of a more engaged world, to understand how Australia is not just a more interesting country thanks to immigration, trade and foreign investment, but also a more affluent one. So thank you for your engagement with AsiaLink. Thanks for all that you do, for your personal connections.

I'm sure you'll learn a thing or two from the formal presentations, but if this cohort is anything like the 29 cohorts that have preceded it, my guess is that the greatest benefits for you will come from the personal connections that you build. So do make sure that you can reach out to each of those and the amazing cohort around you here that you swap those mobile numbers and business cards.