Australia - Transcript - Joint Press Conference with Simon Anholt, Parliament House

SIMON CREAN: We've committed to developing a brand for Australia and we announced the tenders some time ago. Today what I'm announcing is the business advisory group that will help us develop the creative brief to go to the short-listed group of those that have tendered for the initiative.

We've had over 60 expressions of interest, some of them I'm told are really excellent. So we're hoping that what we've really got is a good opportunity to test and challenge the successful tenderer. But this is not just a government decision. This requires importantly some business savvy in it because it's got to be a brand that business is confident about, but also that the community accepts as a credible expression about what Australia is and what it's seeking to offer the rest of the world both in goods and services.

Today we also have the privilege to have with us Simon Anholt who is a world expert in national image. It's Simon's reports that were initially used by Austrade to take a step back and say how does the rest of the world view Australia? And Simon's expertise is in analysing and researching how others view other countries.

So we brought Simon out and we had a very good discussion today with the representatives of the companies that have been appointed to this advisory body. I'll invite him in a minute to talk about the concept of national image and where Australia is perceived in that regard.

We think it's important to try and get this dynamic right so that what we're coming out with is the proper outcome. And not only in terms of the best spend of the money, but the most effective way of promoting that which we take inherently as our breadth of strengths, that which the rest of the world has a strong view about certain aspects of, but not the rest of.

So that's the exercise for us. I should also say that I'm heading off - I'm very busy for the rest of this week. In fact we've got the Pacific Islands countries in Brisbane ....to advance PACER Plus, that was the important initiative that came out of the Cairns meeting in August.

This is the first meeting of trade ministers to advance PACER Plus.

I'm then going to Japan which is the first meeting by an Australian minister in Japan since the new government has come to office. I've already spoken with my counterpart Mr Naoshima by phone. We've had a very good dialogue to date and I'm looking forward to getting into that further, face-to-face.

I also hope to catch up with Deputy Prime Minister Kan, I met him when I went to Japan again as the first minister from Australia when we got elected. He was in the DPJ then, I established contact with him, so we'll try and build on that.

And then of course to Korea at the end of the week to advance the bilateral relationship there.

So if there are any questions about that, let's leave those until last. I'll ask Simon to speak to you about what he's telling us and you can question him as well and then we'll throw it open.

SIMON ANHOLT: Thanks very much Simon. Well, no great surprises really. Australia is a greatly admired country. In fact the phrases often used about Australia is that it punches above its weight and that's certainly true in image terms. It regularly comes within the top 10 of the most admired nations in my survey, the nations' brands index.

Considering that most of the other countries at that level in the index have got substantially larger economies, land areas, political power, economic power and so on and so forth, Australia does remarkably well. There's work to be done of course for a number of reasons.

First of all you never own a good national image, you only rent it. And you have to keep paying the rent and I think some of these initiatives are a very good way of starting that process. I think Australia's image doesn't quite do it justice - even though it's very, very positive – it's a tiny bit soft.

In other words the associations are all with tourism, and that's partly because the tourism industry has done such a good job of promoting Australia as a tourist destination. But it's all a little bit to do with tourism and lifestyle and food and culture and soft stuff.

I think Australia needs and deserves better, and I think the process that is starting with this initiative is starting to tell the world about some of the serious stuff that Australia does in terms of its economic impact, its political gravitas, its intellectual capability: that this is a major power.

And I think that's the message that needs to start to be driven across, that it's not simply decorative, it's also useful. Unlike a great many of the countries I advise Australia faces a rather interesting challenge. A vast majority of the countries that I talk to, their problem, their question is how they can improve their national image, how they can update it, how they can make it more positive, how they can make it better.

Australia's interesting challenge is what do they do with this fantastic image? How can you use it? What can you do with it? And I think you're only beginning to see the beginning of the potential that you can use by leveraging that image in the world. So these are exciting times.

QUESTION: What elements do you think Australia has that gives us this positive image?

SIMON ANHOLT: Well, I think the fact that people in so many of the countries where I run the survey seem to instinctively like and trust Australians. This may be because you don't come with any of the imperial baggage that so many of the great powers come with.

Australia has an enormous capacity, thanks to this image, to move around, to move flexibly, to engage with many other countries without a preset agenda, without mistrust, without fear. This gives you enormously good access and all kinds of opportunities to engage in the challenges of global governance that are proving so difficult for the conventional big powers to tackle.

QUESTION: Mr Crean, what are the practical benefits of not necessarily rebranding Australia but repolishing our image overseas? What do you hope to achieve from this process?

SIMON CREAN: What I hope to achieve is a far more effective mechanism by which we join the dots. Australia is well regarded for its commodity base, its agriculture base. What does the world need at the moment? It needs energy security, it needs food security and it needs to develop its skill base.

Australia can participate in all of those three spaces in spades. But it's not just supplying the raw material. It's marketing quality food. Australia can be the food basket to Asia. And as the Asian economies grow in wealth, their demand isn't just going to be for food for sustenance, it's going to be for nutrition and quality.

When it comes to energy what we also provide is not just the commodity but the cleaner fuel. Australia is effectively to gas what Saudi Arabia is to oil. And so cleaner fuels will have a premium but it's not just our ability to produce the fuels. What makes us good is the efficiency with which we extract it, by which we value add to it, by which we develop the technology around it, by which we market it. And it's all of those services that strengthen the comparative advantage of the nation.

And in the case of education, if nations are going to move forward they have to build the skills of their people. Australia is uniquely placed. It's a trusted provider, an image that's been tarnished somewhat with the Indian students issue. And that has been an attack on the brand if you like because what we offer is quality education, not just any education but quality education, and we have to reinforce that brand.

But the Expo next year and those who - if you were at the launch of the Expo yesterday I think I made this point. Shanghai is going to provide us with a huge opportunity next year to target the fastest growing market in the world and a market going through fundamental transition.

China knows that it's got to move away from simply a growth model based on exporting product to the rest of the world. They have to develop a consumption driven economy. For that they need to embrace safety nets and Australia is well placed to advise in the space of a whole range of things, whether it's medicine, health services, superannuation, those sorts of things.

But China also understands what many countries in Asia are understanding now, that if they want to make the leap from developing country to developed, they've got to be far more embracive of a services based economy.

All of the developed economies in the world have an important feature, that 60 to 70 - in our case 80 per cent of their GDP is contributed to by services.

And so therefore, the combination of the challenge is obviously to create a trade negotiating framework in which the market is opened up for services, but in which we connect the services factor as an enabler to economic development, and Australia's strength is so broadly spread in those areas, as I said at the beginning, we want to join the dots and we want to do it in a way that so whatever the component is, when people say it's Australian, they say quality – and therefore attractive.
They do it in a number of areas now. We've got to broaden the perception about where those areas are. And the Expo in Shanghai is going to provide a huge opportunity for us next year because it's got 80 million people coming to it. Most of them will be in China itself, but there will be a significant international population. We have the opportunity I think to present the breadth of what we've got to offer next year in a big way.

QUESTION: Are services therefore in that, in that sense the new frontier for trade, are they?

SIMON CREAN: I believe they are, and I said this when we came to office, that in the case of the Doha round we said we wanted to give greater emphasis to services. If you look at the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement that we've signed, it's the most comprehensive free trade agreement that ASEAN has entered into because it picks up services and investment. Why are Malaysia and Korea so aggressive now in pursuing their FTAs? Because they know if they want to be considered by the OECD as developed they have to build their services economy.

There is a huge opportunity for Australia to get into this space. One of the reasons we've got a bit of an unlocking in the Doha log-jam is because we've elevated services into that equation.

So, I think that there is a huge opportunity on the trade front for us on services, not just services as a sector in its own right - financial services, education, etcetera – but services as the enabler, the enhancer of one's comparative advantage: smart manufacturing, quality food product, value-added resource materials. It's the enabler, but it's also got an aspirational dimension to it. If countries want to move to the developed phase they've got to embrace services.

So, there's a number of dynamics working in our favour. We have got to pursue the policy framework for that, but we've also got to create the environment in which people understand that we have a lot to offer on that front.

QUESTION: Minister, the rising Australian dollar has hurt a lot of exporters. What message do you have for them?

SIMON CREAN: Well, obviously when the dollar rises it's harder to export. I think that's a given. But the fact is that this fluctuation in the Australian dollar has been a fact of life for our exporters over the past 25 years now since we floated the dollar.

I've got no doubt that the decision to float the dollar was one of the most fundamental policy decisions that this country made that ensured its competitiveness and its ability to actually punch above its weight on so many fronts with the rest of the world.

Now it's true that when you've got the volatility it makes it hard, especially when it's going up. But I think that quite frankly most of the exporters I've spoken to, whilst they don't like it, they've understood over the 25 years how to adjust to it - they either hedge differently or they build factors in that take account of the fact that the dollar might rise.

I might say, Australia is not just an exporter, it's also a value-adder, and for that it needs imports.

And so whatever the exchange rate is doing against exports, it's cheapening, it's lowering the cost of the import that is an input. And so that needs to be taken into account too in terms of cost competitiveness and to a large extent the strength of the dollar is commodity price driven, and that of course is adding significantly to the national income of the nation.

QUESTION: [Inaudible question]

SIMON CREAN: The Japan visit is to talk about the Free Trade Agreement, the bilateral economic relationship. We are about to enter the tenth round of negotiations. What will be interesting to see is how the new government approaches this challenge.

Again, whilst there are difficulties still remaining in agriculture I think there are huge opportunities in the services sector, and with investment flows between the two countries.

There will also be a revitalised business delegation going up there. Rod Eddington has chaired the Australia Japan Business Council. Peter Drysdale has just put out an interesting new study that really demonstrates that there is great opportunity for Australia, Japan, and the strength of its relationship to actually jointly target markets within the region.

One interesting spin-off of is the Lion Nathan takeover by Kirin, and whilst Kirin has bought out Lion Nathan it's retained the marketing arm in Lion Nathan's name, because they understand the strength of that as a marketing mechanism within the region.

Now to me, this opens up huge opportunity for us to get into the food and beverage space much more effectively.

So there are those dimensions to it, and so the business dialogue, the partnership, the opening up of the relationship, but importantly establishing very early in the piece with a new government still our strongest trading partner, the seriousness with which we place the relationship.

QUESTION: Simon, just back to nation branding, you say that Australia has long enjoyed a good reputation overseas. There is a renewed debate in this country about asylum seekers. Do you believe that that could tarnish our reputation overseas, if it hasn't already?

SIMON ANHOLT: In my experience these kinds of happenings don't do very much to the image of the country. One of the things that I have found studying national image over many years is that they are remarkable stable phenomena. It's much more like a capital asset than a liquid currency. It takes many years to build, and most of the time it's pretty hard to damage as well.

Because, the simple reason is that people don't think very much about other countries, and consequently they don't - their perceptions of other countries don't move around very quickly.

So generally speaking, there is a period of grace. If things go wrong, you may suffer some temporary unpopularity, but it doesn't affect the overall image of the country unless the behaviour is repeated over many, many years and then it becomes part of your image and it's very, very hard to undo. But there is this period of grace.

If things go wrong for a little while, it's not going to impact the image dramatically. So there's time to fix it. There's time to change the policies. There's time to make things better. There's time to make amends. There's time to do some high profile gestures to show that you're not the country people think you are, and the image is generally safe.

One of the advantages of having a powerful and positive national image is that it is an insurance policy against things going wrong. People will continue to trust you for a little while, not forever, but for a little while.

QUESTION: Some commentators have said Australia has an image that is racist overseas, particularly with countries in Europe. Is that something you have found at all?

SIMON ANHOLT: No, not at all.

QUESTION: Never?

SIMON ANHOLT: I have never seen any evidence of that whatsoever. In fact, quite the contrary. All the evidence is that people associate Australia with a wonderful, laid back, easy going kind of personality, which I know irks some Australians. I mean, it's a thing I've often said that in a sense the defining image of the Australian is the movie Crocodile Dundee, and the Australians are infuriated by this because it seems like a reduction, a cliché, and so on and so forth. But actually it's not half bad.

Just as an introduction to the kind of people, it bares perhaps a distant relationship to what Australians are really like, and it's very positive indeed.

QUESTION: Minister, can I just ask you - sorry - do you endorse Kevin Rudd's comments that people arriving on boats are illegal immigrants?

SIMON CREAN: Well, some of them may be but in the main they're refugees.

I mean, I think the importance about what we're trying to do and the fundamental difference between our approach to this and the previous government, we always said we were going to secure our borders. We said that. But we also recognised that the refugee issue is of a global dimension and requires a global response.

Our criticism…

QUESTION: Is it premature to call them illegal, though?

SIMON CREAN: …of the previous government was that they never did anything to work with other nations to deal with the flow and then the accommodation. And that's what we said going into the election we would develop, and that's what we'll continue to develop.

And I think you can see the relationships that we've had with Indonesia in the last week or so, an important part of that country to country, but we need to take it further and develop the international response as well.

QUESTION: It's not premature, though, to call them illegal?

SIMON CREAN: No.

ENDS