TIM DAVIES:
Great to have you both here with us this evening. This is worthy of celebration ‑ 40 years. I have to start by asking though, much has been said this evening about the rivalry, particularly on the sporting field between our two great nations. But if I can, aside from sport, one key area from both of you that you admire about the other country. Prime Minister, let's start with you.
CHRIS HIPKINS:
Goodness me. I could say I think all New Zealanders admire Australians' ability to live with a number of animals and creatures that want to eat or kill them. More seriously, I mean, I think the respect that New Zealanders have for the can do approach of Australians, you know, the make things happen approach, the level of resilience and resolve and ingenuity that we see on the other side of the Tasman is something that I think we can both relate to and respect.
DAVIES:
Treasurer Chalmers, that was good.
JIM CHALMERS:
I was going to say the best thing about New Zealand is Grant Robertson, the Finance Minister but mostly because we caucused on that earlier today and he said he'd be very grateful if I said that to all of you, particularly this really quite incredible delegation you've brought from corporate New Zealand. Welcome to everyone. I think there are two things. From my point of view, very specifically, I take a lot of my cues from New Zealand when it comes to the way that you think about the economy and particularly about this idea that we’re supposed to align our economic objectives with what we want for our society more broadly. And so Grant and I and others spend a lot of time talking about wellbeing and following your lead on that front. But there's also something less tangible which is, there's this remarkable welcoming spirit from New Zealanders and I know this from my own community. We were joking before of the 700,000 New Zealanders living in Australia, 699,000 of them live in my electorate. But there is this wonderful, welcoming, inclusive, casual confidence about New Zealanders and it's something I know that we really appreciate. It's possible to meet someone for the first time from New Zealand and feel like you've known them your whole life and I think that's one of the many reasons why we get along so famously.
DAVIES:
It is interesting, isn't it though that you know, as Australians, we can pick the Kiwi accent and vice versa. But you go to America, for example. They all see us as one, don't they? Tonight though, as we mark this 40th anniversary of the agreement, its success, obviously, with the Closer Economic Relations has been attributed to the fact that it has moved with the times. Moving forward as you indicated earlier, Prime Minister with the next 40 years and what's to come, how do you see the success of this agreement in moving forward?
HIPKINS:
I think we can continue to see a strengthening of the economic relationship. Obviously, trade between our two countries is incredibly important. The ability of New Zealand businesses to establish themselves in Australia and vice versa, Australian businesses to establish themselves in New Zealand has been a feature of CER that we want to be able to continue to foster the environment where that happens but we're going to need to evolve and adapt as the world around us continues to evolve and adapt. One of the features I think of CER that's incredibly important to the success of the arrangement is the alignment of our regulatory systems. And regulatory systems I think around the world are going to face a whole lot of new challenges in the coming years that are going to test us in a number of different ways and I think making sure that we align our responses to those will be very important to ensuring that the trans‑Tasman relationship can continue to prosper. And so I think about things like artificial intelligence, for example, which is going to throw up all sorts of new and exciting opportunities but also some new dilemmas for government and for decision makers and making sure that we're confronting those sorts of things together so that we can continue with that common alignment so that doing business in New Zealand, doing business in Australia isn't seen as different it's something that's utterly compatible because that's what it has been and I think we just need to continue to make sure we keep it that way.
CHALMERS:
I think when it comes to Closer Economic Relations, obviously the flow of trade, the flow of ideas, the flow of capital, all of these things are crucial, but one of the reasons why I'm so immensely proud of what we were able to announce today ‑ about the flow of people between our two countries ‑ is because I think for too long there has been an imbalance in the way that we think about that. And I wanted to pay tribute to Minister Clare O'Neil, who did the lion's share of the work along with Minister Andrew Giles. And they found a very willing supporter in Prime Minister Albanese and the Cabinet more broadly, as well. We've got this thing in our team that's been there for some time. Clare and I were elected almost 10 years ago and we've got a Kiwi caucus in the Parliamentary Labor Party and for really that whole time, we've been trying to work towards this outcome that we announced today and it means a lot to us and it means a lot, PM, that you acknowledged in your remarks a moment ago that it is, I hope it is a sign of respect that we consider balance when it comes to the flow of people to be a really important thing. It means a lot to our local communities as Clare and others here know and Carolyn Evans from Griffith University has been a willing supporter and others who are here. It means a lot to us. And to have done that today, I think, I hope is a demonstration on the 40th anniversary of CER that we want those relations and that agreement not to just have a history that we're proud of but a future that we can be proud of as well.
DAVIES:
Well said. With the business sectors in both countries under significant pressure with labour shortages, rising inflation. Treasurer, a question really for you here. Do you see scope for this agreement to potentially help solve those problems moving forward?
CHALMERS:
Absolutely. Grant and I spend a lot of time at international discussions, as I'm sure PM Hipkins and PM Albanese and Ministers do as well and really the big challenge in the global community and particularly when we think about the fragmentation that's occurred post‑COVID is really how do we get our supply chains in much better condition and how do we make sure we're getting the people that we need, the labour markets that we need to satisfy our economic and social objectives. And a big part of our inflation problem in our economy, certainly, in the New Zealand economy and comparable economies around the world is that our supply chains are more or less busted. And what we really want is we want those supply chains to be reliable and for those supply chains to be reliable, we need to set them up with reliable partners and there's no more reliable partner than New Zealand. And when it comes to people, we've spoken a little bit about that already but you think about those big shifts that we're seeing in our economies, both of our economies, whether it's technology and what it means for work, whether it's the shift towards services and particularly the care economy, whether it's the shift to cleaner and cheaper and more reliable, increasingly renewable energy, all of these things require us to make much more robust and resilient supply chains and also make sure that we've got the well trained workforce that we need to succeed in what will be, I think, a defining decade for both of our countries.
DAVIES:
And with today's announcement, in particular, quite significant. With relation to that, moving together as one.
HIPKINS:
Absolutely. And look, we see, I think I would echo both of the comments just made there around the importance of the resilience of the supply chain but also I guess the mutual interest we have in growing the skills and talent on both sides of the Tasman because we do live in a very mobile environment where labour will move to where there are opportunities and I think that, you know, New Zealand and Australia can work together on these issues. We see a number of New Zealanders come to Australia to gain skills and to gain experience that they might not be able to get in New Zealand but they then come home with it afterwards and I think, you know, if we can continue to grow the opportunities for people to do that, I think both countries will be the stronger for it.
DAVIES:
Climate change. It's a big one for business and for both of our nations. How do you see this agreement moving forward in the scope of climate change?
HIPKINS:
We've got some really big challenges ahead if we're going to actually hit that goal of limiting our temperature rise to 1.5 degrees. And it's not going to be easy and it's going to require a number of big adaptations, both here, in New Zealand, across the Pacific and across the globe. And I think that, you know, we're very attuned ‑ New Zealand and Australia will both be very attuned ‑ to the Pacific concern about climate change where they're already seeing the effects of rising global temperatures and we're seeing it in more extreme weather events and we've seen cooperation between New Zealand and Australia with regard to recent extreme weather events that we have seen. And again, I'd like to acknowledge the Australian presence in New Zealand following Cyclone Gabrielle and the Australian Defence Force in particular and the USAR teams who came over straightaway to provide us with that extra support that we that we needed and the mutual, I guess, cooperation that we have around these issues. But I think in terms of looking ahead to the future challenges around climate change, energy adaptation and the uptake of new technology, these are areas where both of our countries can work closely together to ensure that we're maximising the opportunities that are ahead of us. Things like the uptake of electric vehicles, for example. New Zealand is a relatively small market in the global market for electric vehicles but combined with Australia, actually, we're a bigger market and so we can work together to make sure that we've got the incentives right together to create a big enough consumer pool for the uptake of new technology to be more viable.
CHALMERS:
Well, first of all, I agree with what the PM said. We have a responsibility to our brothers and sisters in the Pacific when it comes to climate change but also, in addition to that, a central part of what we want to achieve in growing our own economy ‑ it might be the most important part ‑ is how do we encourage more investment in cleaner and cheaper energy. And a big part of that is aggregating the opportunities in ways that you've just described.
Yesterday, on the other side of the River here, we convened the biggest investors in Australia for a conversation about the energy transformation and I remember thinking and knowing that I'd be seeing you tonight, just how familiar each of those investors are on either side of the ditch. And so, there's an opportunity, when they think about the attractiveness or otherwise of investing in the US or somewhere else in the world, they do see us as part of the same market and that's helpful to both of us. There is a heap of interest, a mountain of interest in investing in energy, in particular, in both of our countries. I don't feel like we're competing against each other for this investment, I feel like we're aggregating that investment and that opportunity and I'm pretty sure that's how these investors which represented more than $2 trillion in assets around the table, I'm pretty sure that's how they saw it too.
DAVIES:
We could sit here and talk all night, but I know I only have you for a hot minute. So thank you both very much for helping dive a little deeper into that.