Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is addressed to the Treasurer. Would the Treasurer advise the House of regional and global fora to promote economic stability across our region. How do these fora advance Australia’s interests?

Peter Costello (Higgins, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The APEC finance ministers will be meeting in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Thursday and Friday of this week. It is the 13th such annual meeting. Vietnam being a developing economy, the principal focus of the APEC Finance Ministers Meeting will be on how to promote capital flows in the region, particularly investment in developing countries.

After the APEC meeting, at which I will be representing Australia, I will be going to South Africa to confer with finance minister Trevor Manuel, who will become the chairman of the Group of Twenty after Australia’s host year concludes at the end of this year. The Group of Twenty brings together the developed and the developing worlds to discuss matters of global international financial architecture. It will be meeting in November in Melbourne, because Australia is the chair.

The issues that we have placed on the agenda for that meeting include energy security. We will be bringing together energy producers such as Saudi Arabia and Russia and large global energy users such as China and the United States. We will also be engaging in discussion on demographic change and the effect on financial flows and trade.

The G20 has also developed into an important forum for reform of the international financial institutions of the IMF and the World Bank. The IMF and World Bank meetings will be held in Singapore on 19 and 20 September and prospects are good for a proposal which has been put forward by the G20, but in particular by Australia, to be adopted at that meeting in Singapore. It is a proposal to increase voting shares of the most clearly underrepresented members of the IMF—China, Korea, Mexico and Turkey—with a second stage of additional reform to align shares with relative positions in the world economy. This will be an extremely significant reform of the International Monetary Fund in accordance with the development of the global economy. Australia has been at the forefront of efforts to see this adopted, particularly through our influence in the G20—probably the premier meeting of central bank governors and finance ministers in the world, which will be held in Australia in November of this year.