ウィスパリング同時通訳研究会コミュのSpecial Address by Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia | Davos Agenda 2022

Prime Minister: Well, thank you very much, Borge, it’s very good to be joining you, and thank you for that very kind introduction. So, g’day from Australia.
It is a pleasure to join this forum as you continue what has been a half century conversation about the state of the world.
As your 2022 Global Risks Report notes: ‘The economic fallout from the pandemic is compounding with labour market imbalances, protectionism, and widening digital, education and skills gaps that risk splitting the world into divergent trajectories.’
Now like the rest of the world, Australia has not been immune to the disruption and devastating impacts of this global pandemic.
We all have a responsibility to address these challenges, with practical solutions to ensure - both within countries and between them - we grow together, not apart.
We are now facing the immediate challenges of Omicron, a rapidly evolving variant and the need for vaccinations and boosters, as we go around now in Australia for our third round of of doses.
Omicron underscores this simple fact that there is no guidebook to this pandemic. There’s no magic GPS system for avoiding the enormous stresses and strains it continues to place on all nations - be they governments, businesses, communities, families, and indeed individuals, wherever they are.
Yet amidst this fog of radical uncertainty, Australia, well, we’ve charted a very clear path, and it’s been our own unique path through this pandemic - what we call the Australian way.
And in the process, we’ve achieved amongst the lowest death rates in the world, the highest vaccination rates and one of the strongest performing advanced economies in the world to come through those pandemic. We’ve always been prepared to save lives and save livelihoods. And we’ve seen those as important dual tasks through this pandemic.
We have been realists in our approach. We’ve been prepared to take action early, closing our borders, initiating our national pandemic plans, calling it the pandemic some fortnight before even the WHO named COVID-19 as a pandemic.
We’ve been highly pragmatic and consultative. We’ve been prepared to listen to the expert medical advice, and act on it - the best available medical advice - but also the best available economic advice.
As I’ve said many times in Australia, a pandemic is no place for ideology. You’ve got to do what works. At the same time, we’ve been principled and very clear-eyed in our response.
At all times, our goal, as I said, has been to save lives and livelihoods. Our approach has reflected Australia’s unique circumstances and our institutional structures, our federation first and foremost, such as our mixed also public and private health system, which continues to perform well.
Our unprecedented economic supports, delivered in a form that kept employees attached to their workplaces as businesses went into an unspecified period of hibernation back in 2020. It gave businesses the confidence that they could get through tomorrow each and every day.
And we were clear that our measures were never designed to be open-ended, but they were to be temporary and targeted, respecting that there were taxpayers’ money that that was being spent.
And at all times, we put our faith and trust in the common sense and public spiritedness of the Australian people. And that trust was well-founded.
No country, Australia included, we don’t pretend that every every response has been perfect. No country could claim that. No government could claim that. But what I am very proud of is Australia has been able to stay focused on these key, these key goals.
We have the second lowest death rate from COVID in the OECD. We have the eighth highest full vaccination rate in the OECD. And fully 93 per cent of Australians aged over 16 are now double dose vaccinated, and around a third have had a booster dose. And over 60 per cent who are eligible for that booster dose have now had it.
Our latest economic growth figures for the third quarter of 2021 showed we were just 0.2 per cent below where we were going into the pandemic, whereas most advanced countries, economies nations were remain one to two per cent down on pre-pandemic levels.
And we finished 2021 very strongly in the fourth quarter. Our unemployment rate fell to 4.2 per cent. Now that’s the lowest rate we’ve seen since 2008. At the height of the pandemic, we had an effective rate of unemployment of almost 15 per cent. And that effective rate now is equated with the actual rate of 4.2 per cent.
And our participation rate remained at near record highs, so nothing points to any great resignation by Australians. That is not what’s been occurring here. Our economy has been coming through strongly. We’ve retained our AAA credit rating - only one of a handful of countries who’ve been able to do so.
And let me make another point to this audience. From the outset, our Government always say, saw the way through this as backing a business-led recovery. We did not see a Government-centred recovery sustaining into the future. There was certainly a role for Government, but for the role for the Government was to ensure that we would have a sustainable business-led recovery.
We knew we were dealing with a public health crisis, albeit one with profound economic and social consequences. We never saw it as cover for some sort of funky experiment to transform our economic system. We haven’t seen this as some long-term invitation for the return of a, or the establishment of some state-centred economy. And there's good reason for that.
It’s worth remembering that prior to the COVID recession Australia had been recession-free for 28 and a half years - and by some accounts, that is a world record amongst advanced economies. Now this achievement was based on a track record of strong economic management and market-oriented economic reform over many, many decades. Yet we also know that our economy was going to face challenges, and that’s our outlook now.
COVID is helping accelerate big political, economic and technological changes that have been happening for some time. And forces that have been shaping a post-pandemic world is what I really want to focus on this evening, Australian time - these larger forces and the approach that we’re taking in Australia to support our economic recovery and our resilience into the next decade.
And the five I want to touch on tonight are as follows:
Firstly, the acceleration of the digital economy - the need to align the digital and physical worlds, and the centrality of digital to economic growth in the modern economy.
Secondly, heightening demand for skills and research talent in our economy - the need for world-class skills and training, more adaptable workplaces and closer collaboration between business and our research and science community.
Thirdly, a sharper geo-political competition has emerged, and this is playing out in multiple realms and regions, but with an epi-centre being in our region here in the Indo Pacific, as we see it.
Fourthly, there are new pressures on global supply chains and open trade, and we’ve seen that coming for some time now, with governments and companies having to reassess their rules, their assumptions from what some have called the era of ‘hyper-globalisation’.
And fifthly, the drive towards decarbonisation in the global economy, but for continued need to access affordable, reliable energy to drive our economies - with technological innovation and the push for a deep transition in the global energy system, alongside the need to maintain, as I said, that affordable and reliable energy for customers and businesses.
So we face these challenges in tandem with navigating a strong and sustainable recovery. The experience of past recessions suggests it’s less the depth of the recession that matters as the need and speed of the recovery. The world needs a fast recovery - reminiscent of those in the 80s and the 90s - not the prolonged sluggish recovery that followed the GFC in the 2010s.
This is vital because we know COVID has accentuated new divides between those bearing the brunt of the pandemic and those able to insulate, between countries that have strong health and vaccination infrastructure and those who sadly don’t, between the sectors that are growing - such as logistics, and health and IT, and the sectors that have truly suffered - in tourism and travel, and business events and the like.
A fast recovery must be our shared economic mission. A recovery that’s about creating jobs, building wealth and prosperity, and that narrows the divides in our communities - because shared prosperity is always the foundation for a strong and stable democracy and global security.
So let’s talk about some of those in turn. The acceleration of the digital economy. So, when COVID hit, the digital economy went gangbusters. Adaptation and innovation was almost immediate. Australia jumped five years ahead in digital adoption in almost the blink of an eye. Around nine in 10 Australian firms have adopted new technologies.
Our investments across digital capabilities meant essential government services remained operational and available. In 2020-21, there were 1.4 billion online interactions with government, an increase of 126 million on the previous financial year.
And just as we were stepping up as governments, the private sector was doing exactly the same thing. Solving problems. Unleashing change. And understanding that in a pandemic profound change was necessary to be able to push through.
In Australia, we estimate that increased digitalisation could add some $90 billion to our economy, as well as create some 250,000 jobs in the near future. Under our Digital Strategy, Australia aims to be a top 10 digital economy by 2030, and we’re well on the way to that.
And the key question is, how do we navigate this shift sustainably? We do it in a way that serves our economy but also our values as a liberal democratic society. We must encourage investment in jobs and opportunities that digital technologies generate. And at the same time, we need to ensure the digital world - and this is very important - is safe, it is secure and is trusted.
Now as leaders, we’re walking a tightrope - trying to get that balance and those settings right. Some of those settings are about clearing the way for business, getting out of the way. And in Australia, that has meant driving world-leading reforms in open banking, e-invoicing and digital identity, which means frankly people get paid more quickly, boosting cash flows, particularly in the small and medium enterprise sector. And unlocking the transformational opportunity of critical technologies - most recently with a new Quantum Commercialisation Hub, to commercialise the world-class quantum research we do here in Australia.
We’ve seen significant strides in our local tech sector, with global success stories like Atlassian and Canva and Afterpay. And we’ve seen enhanced engagement from international tech giants. For example, Google recently investing $1 billion to expand its presence here in Australia, including with a new Google Research Hub right here in Sydney, one of only a handful of cities where Google has decided that that’s where they need to be to drive that innovation and their investment.
Now as we encourage that investment, we are putting an equal amount of effort into ensuring the online world has the same rules as the physical world. You can’t be the wild west where just anything goes, because while the online world presents many great opportunities, it also presents very real risks to people’s safety, particularly women and children.
And Australia is taking world-leading action on this front, both at home as well as through international fora, like the G20. With the appointment of a dedicated eSafety Commissioner - we understand the world’s first, preparing legislation to unmask trolls who defame others by making platforms responsible for what is published on their platforms, strengthening online privacy protections, working with the social media companies, to make sure they combat misinformation and disinformation on their platforms. And of course, ensuring they take action in relation to terrorist-related content.
Secondly, it’s about heightening demand for skills and talent in our economy. And the pandemic has put up in lights the absolute importance of a healthy, skilled, productive and flexible workforce as the foundation for prosperity and security.
It has brought to the fore the argument that the World Economic Forum has been making for some time about human capital. To put it bluntly, a sense that too many businesses have undervalued and underappreciated the people on which the economic value of their firm and their nation rests.
Just how important can be seen in the context of the pandemic. Suddenly, how we work was completely upended. This led to the reconfiguring of workforces, challenging assumptions about how and where we could work. And as I mentioned earlier, Australia’s unemployment is just down to just over four per cent. Now that’s one of the lowest since records began here in Australia over 40 years ago.
And with that, efficiently matching the skills of our workforce with the needs of a modern and transforming economy, that’s a challenge and it’s incredibly important to meet the challenge. So how we anticipate those needs and plug workforce shortages must now happen in real time.
As a Government we actually doubled our investment in skills training through the pandemic, and one of the first invention initiatives we took in the economy was to keep our apprentices in jobs through wage subsidies for those businesses to ensure we did not suffer a generation of lost skills. Those apprentices, particularly the younger ones, would have been the first off, and they would never have got back on, and they would have been lost from our economy and the important skills training they would have been undertaking during this pandemic period. Well we kept them in there, and today we have more apprentices in trade training in Australia than at any time since we’ve been collecting records since 1963.
And we’re also planning ahead. On Australia’s horizon, there are huge opportunities - in the new energy economy, in the services sector, in modern, high-tech manufacturing - as well as in our traditional sense, strengths like resources, minerals and agriculture.
A few months ago, I met with some workers who have transitioned from car manufacturing to portable brain-scanner technology down in Adelaide. They were making cars before. Now they're making some of the world’s most advanced medical equipment in the world. And we’re going to see much more of that. Our Modern Manufacturing Initiative is investing in businesses right across the country to see them make that leap and do the transition.
So more jobs are requiring higher skills levels. STEM jobs are set to grow twice as fast as non-STEM jobs.
And the National Skills Commission, which was established by our Government, talks about the four C’s - areas that capture the pressing skills needs in the coming years. They are care, computing, cognitive and communication skills. And that’s where we’re headed.
In Australia, we’re working closely with business to design a better skills system - one that’s more integrated with industry, that promotes lifelong learning, and ensures future workforce needs are met. To put it another way, if people get trained to do the jobs that businesses need them to do, and that they need in order to get a job, and have a living in this country into the future with confidence.
Our Government is enhancing incentives for also ‘trailblazer universities’. We’re challenging business to get closer to our research institutes and partnering with business as we look to create a new generation of ‘researcher entrepreneurs’ here in Australia to help fire future growth. This is the, this is the land that brought WiFi, this is the land that brought the cochlear implant.
We have also implemented bold initiatives such as the Global Business and Talent Attraction Taskforce, which has been established to attract exceptional talent and marquee enterprises here to Australia.
The third deep trend I want to touch on is sharper geopolitical competition. Now the global strategic environment has changed rapidly, even over the last few years and before the pandemic, and it has deteriorated in many respects, in our view.
We live in what is an increasingly fragmented and contested world, particularly here in the Indo-Pacific, which has become the world’s strategic centre of gravity. The challenges we face are many. There are tensions over territorial claims, there is rapid military modernisation, there is foreign interference occurring in nations right across the Indo-Pacific and here in Australia, there’s malicious cyber threats and attacks that are taking place, disinformation, economic coercion. This is a highly contested space where we’re seeing much [inaudible] tactics being employed throughout the region intended to seek to coerce and intimidate.
Meeting these challenges demands cooperation and common purpose amongst those who believe in a, in a world order that favours freedom and the rule of law. That has been the basis for the world’s prosperity since the Second World war.
Australia’s interests are inextricably linked to an open, inclusive, resilient and prosperous Indo-Pacific. One where the rights of all states are protected, along with their aspirations as sovereign nations. We are working constructively towards this, building and strengthening a web of alignment to support these goals. Now that includes our Pacific family, through the Pacific Islands Forum, the nations in the Pacific. Our ASEAN friends, who are central to our vision for the region. Australia is the first nation to have been able to conclude a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership Agreement with ASEAN. And through the Quad, with our Quad partners India, Japan and the United States. This is not just about strategic and security issues. It’s about making a positive contribution in our region, from everything from energy supply chains and critical minerals, critical technologies, through to our response collectively to support countries throughout the region through the pandemic. With our growing number of comprehensive strategic partners, and our partners with, across Europe, like multilateral fora including the G20 and APEC and the OECD, and with our longstanding friends and allies, we are forming these alignments that are effective in securing peace and promoting peace in the Indo-Pacific.