Today I will attend the G20 Finance Ministers' and Central Bank Governors' Meeting in Gyeonju, Korea, at a time when the global recovery remains fragile and uneven.
This is the important preparatory meeting before the G20 Leaders' Summit in Seoul next month where we will continue to work on our extensive reform agenda.
The G20 provided crucial leadership to deliver coordinated action during the worst economic crisis to hit the world since the Great Depression.
Even as Australia's economy strengthens, global engagement remains just as important as it was during our successful response to the crisis.
The global economic recovery is patchy and uneven, and the risks remain titled to the downside, and of course the Australian economy will not be immune from these developments.
So every Australian has an interest in ensuring global growth gets back on track in a sustainable way that builds momentum and confidence. These meetings provide crucial building blocks to that.
The key focus of the weekend's meetings will be developing a framework for strong, sustainable and balanced growth. This work is focussed on delivering a broad range of key economic reforms. This will involve a discussion around global imbalances and the structural reforms needed to address them, including moving towards increased exchange rate flexibility which is of benefit to individual countries and the G20 as a whole.
I will use these meetings to stress the importance of the G20 delivering on its commitment to reform the IMF into a body that better reflects the global realities of today, representing the weight of emerging economies just as effectively as advanced economies.
A responsive, well resourced and properly representative IMF is crucial to the future stability and prosperity of the global economy.
I will also continue to work with my G20 colleagues to reform our global financial system to ensure we never have another repeat of the global financial crisis. I'll be pushing hard to ensure that any global principles agreed are appropriate to our unique domestic circumstances, the strength of our financial system and the relatively small amount of government debt on issue.
On Sunday, together with my Korean counterpart, Minister Jeung-Hyun Yoon, I will host the Australia-Korea Business Dialogue in Seoul. This meeting will bring together a group of high profile business people from both Australia and Korea. The dialogue will focus on financial services, green growth and the sustainable development of energy and resources, which are all key elements of the bilateral economic relationship. This meeting is a powerful symbol of the strong cooperation between Australia and Korea during Korea's G20 host year and of the strong bilateral economic relationship that we share.
GYEONJU