Transcript: 2013 Australia Germany Innovation Forum - Introduction

Transcript

24 January 2013

>>Nicola Watkinson: So without any more ado I’m going to pass over to the ambassador, Peter Tesch, to help us to get things started. Thanks Peter.

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>>Peter Tesch: There is a huge level of interest in Australia, as you would know, heightened by a growing German awareness of the importance of the Asia-Pacific region, not just economically but strategically from a security policy perspective and we are seeing in the German-Australian relationship an extraordinary upswing in the level of political engagement, and that’s being fired also by the production by the Australian government last year of the White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century.

Importantly this paper calls for Australia to have an innovation system in the top 10 globally and to do this we need to attract international investment, we have to foster research collaborations with leading partners around the globe and with the best sources of innovation and, of course, Germany ranks right up there with the world’s best.

Germany and Australia work very closely together. It is consistently in the top three or four of our research and scientific partners measured by the number of joint publications and we have, I think, a very good opportunity as we come to the culmination of the 60th anniversary of formal diplomatic relations, and this forum really helps round off the last 12 months of activity where we have been staging inaugural science circles, drawing on visits by leading scientific figures from both countries, the embassy in Canberra, our embassy in Berlin have been using these people to help foster an awareness of and stimulate discussion about forthcoming opportunities and the potential yet untapped across a range of fields.

The scientific relationship, the communities have identified preventative health, biodiversity and clean energy as the priorities in which both governments want to see the agenda developed but there are many, many more things happening at the university level and we are very keen to exploit those to help create an awareness of what Australia brings to the table.

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