China may be prepared to lift its trade sanctions against Australian wine in polite preparation for Anthony Albanese’s visit to Beijing this weekend.
Nicholas Moore says South-East Asia will be home to big infrastructure projects. “Unless you get in at the beginning, you won’t be there at the end.”Australia, he says, is lagging badly behind other countries in the investment race in the world’s crucial growth region and the government needs to do much, much more to help businesses step up the pace.
“Unless you get in at the beginning, you won’t be there at the end,” he says, pointing to estimates of the region needing $3 trillion in infrastructure investment plus similarly high levels of green investment by 2040. “Other countries are investing there and we are not,” Moore says. “So there’s a gap that needs to be filled for Australia to reflect that same level. When we look at the major countries investing, it’s their government financing agencies and the governments themselves that are very much part of it – Korean, Chinese, American, European – the governments are involved.”Governments and businesses within the region also tend to work closely together, he says.
“The Moore report is about business and business interests primarily and that’s fine, but we need to build genuine cross-cultural capability and human-to-human links. Instead, Australia always comes across as a two-bit player trying to sell stuff.”But according to Moore, no one in South-East Asian business or government raised the issue of Australia’s dependence on the US with him in negative terms. He would have been surprised if they had, he says.
The urgency is even more pressing given he predicts the growth levels seen in the US, Europe and Australia over the past few decades are unlikely to be repeated. Projected compound annual growth rates of around 4 per cent in South-East Asia look considerably healthier than 1-2 per cent in developed economies.