Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Today I had the great pleasure of welcoming Prime Minister Lawrence Wong to our parliament, his first official visit to Australia as Prime Minister of Singapore. Last night at the Lodge, Jodie Haydon and I had the privilege of hosting Mr and Mrs Wong—a delightful dinner, great company, good discussion on an informal level about the challenges that the world faces together.

Prime Minister Wong's delegation included the minister for defence, the minister for foreign affairs, the minister for manpower and a minister in charge of energy, science and technology. In defence cooperation, medical research, education, clean energy and a range of other sectors, Singapore and Australia are close partners. Our two nations are even closer friends.

This year, as we celebrate 60 years of Singapore's independence, 60 years of diplomatic relations and 10 years of our comprehensive strategic partnership, we are taking that cooperation to the next level. Today, Prime Minister Wong and I agreed to an upgraded comprehensive strategic partnership. This will help ensure supply chains remain resilient. It will support our action together on climate change. It will strengthen pandemic preparedness and research cooperation. It will boost development on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies. It will further partnerships between our public services, universities and the arts.

In addition to our upgraded partnership, ministers have signed MOUs across the board, including an important one on enhanced defence cooperation. This is about allowing access—which currently only the United States has—to Singapore's ports and, of course, its magnificent airport. This really is a game changer for Australia's presence in our regions to the north. It's really important and is something I've worked through with Prime Minister Wong. I thank the Minister for Defence and Deputy Prime Minister for the work that he's done with his counterpart on that as well.

We also have our economic resilience agreement and an agreement working with our ASEAN partners. Both our nations are proud and constructive supporters of multilateral dialogues. Both of our nations support free and fair trade. We spoke about Australia and Singapore's focus on ASEAN and its central role in this region—particularly in the lead-up to Singapore chairing ASEAN in 2027.

This is an important time where the world is seeing a lot of turbulence and uncertainty. What we can be certain about is that our friends in Singapore have the same values and the same interests as we do here, in Australia, and the agreements that we've signed today and the presence of Prime Minister Wong here, along with his delegation, are so important. All of that underlines the value of true and trusted friends such as Australia and Singapore.

This is a friendship of course—it is 60 years of Singapore's independence. We were one of the first countries to recognise Singapore and that's not surprising, because of the relationship that we had—including, of course, with the devastation that Singapore suffered during World War II. The people-to-people relations are absolutely critical.

One of the things that is important is that nations have relationships. It's also important that leaders have relationships, and I've developed a good relationship with Prime Minister Wong. He stood in whilst at the Shangri-La Dialogue that I spoke at—unfortunately his predecessor Prime Minister Lee suffered from COVID, so he hosted me on my bilateral visit to Singapore during that time.

This is a relationship between not just nations and leaders but also peoples, and one of the initiatives of the former government was to bring back the Colombo Plan. That is continuing to deliver, with more Australians going to Singapore to study as well as Singapore residents coming here. Prime Minister Wong would have attended here. He wanted to go to the Australian War Memorial to pay his respects as well. He is a most valued leader. I wish him well on his visit across the ditch to New Zealand. I'm sure that this is a relationship that will continue to grow stronger into the future.

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