Mr SIDEBOTTOM (Braddon—Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) (10:46): I present the report of the Australian Parliamentary Delegation to Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore 6 to 16 November 2011. I present this report not in my capacity as Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry but as leader of that delegation. I acknowledge the warm and friendly welcome we received at the meetings in each country and thank our hosts for their willingness to engage with us in frank and open discussion. I cannot overstate the value of delegation visits such as this one. Two abiding outcomes in particular arose from our visit. The first is that nothing builds trust and understanding and promotes the discovery of common interests better than meeting people face to face. After visiting the region, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Australia's future prosperity and security is, in common with all the ASEAN countries, best secured by promoting peace and free trade in our region and around the world. Second and related to the first: historically, education has played an important role in the development of Australia's relationships in the region. The Colombo Plan, you might remember, marked the establishment of Australia as an international education destination. We are built on this, and education is now a major export industry for Australia that continues to promote links between Australia and other countries and ensures large numbers of former foreign students are comfortable doing business in and with Australia. But it is fundamentally a one-way street, for very few Australians study in Asian countries, and Australia needs to address this if we are to be further integrated into Asian growth and prosperity in the medium to long term. The report has made recommendations intended to encourage more Australians to take up opportunities to study in ASEAN countries and to provide them with additional practical support while they do so. I believe that encouraging many more Australians to study in the region is the single most important thing we can do to strengthen our cultural and economic relationships with ASEAN countries in the longer term. The trade relationships with the countries visited are very important to Australia. For example, two-way trade with Vietnam is over $6 billion, with Thailand around $19 billion and with Singapore around $23 billion. Vietnam has a population of around 90 million, and GDP per capita has been growing steadily as Vietnam opens up and reforms its economy to encourage foreign investment. On such a short visit to one city you come away with the impression that Vietnam has enormous social and economic potential, that it is building economic momentum and that it is about to take off. It has a large, youthful and energetic workforce; food security; significant reserves of oil, gas, and other minerals; and forests and fisheries which support its economic development. It follows that there are significant opportunities for further developing the economic relationship between Australia and Vietnam. Vietnam is actively seeking foreign investment to provide the capital necessary to further develop its natural resources, expand energy production and build the transport and distribution infrastructure necessary to support development in other sectors. We also visited Thailand, which is so important to Australia in terms of trade and in normal diplomatic relationships. Indeed, we visited Thailand in the midst of the flood crisis which occurred in November 2011. We share many of the issues that face a relatively flat country, and there is more that we can do and more ways that we can benefit from each other in relation to this. A highlight of our visit to Thailand was the opportunity to visit Hellfire Pass and the related memorial museum and to lay wreaths at the Hellfire Pass memorial cairn and at the Kanchanaburi War Cemetery in honour of the prisoners of war who died working on the Thailand-Burma Railway. We were privileged to meet a group of British former POWs who despite their advanced age and the tropical heat made their way down Hellfire Pass and back, highlighting the need the Hellfire Pass memorial complex has for a suitable vehicle to transport elderly visitors to and from the memorial cairn. We have recommended that the Australian government fund the purchase of a suitable light vehicle. Finally, we visited our very good friends in Singapore, with whom we have major trade agreements and also diplomatic and military ties. Singapore has very limited space available for military training, and an aspect of the defence relationship highly valued by Singapore is the unilateral access to military training areas Australia allows to Singapore. I thank my colleagues the members for Gippsland, Reid, Cowper and Swan and those who organised this very important and highly productive delegation.