 Today I'm joined by Claire Walsh from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in Canberra. Claire is Chair of the G20's Development Working Group. Claire, thank you for your time today. Thanks for the opportunity. It's very nice to be here. The G20 is generally associated with a core agenda of driving economic growth in jobs. Why does the G20 have a Development Working Group? So actually the answer is in your question, exactly right, the G20 is looking at economic growth in jobs. And if you have a look at where the global economy is being driven, you'll see that around three quarters of the world's economic growth is coming from developing countries and emerging economies. So it's absolutely in the interest of the G20 to be thinking about those groups of countries in achieving its objectives. The other thing I would say is that as economies converge, as the big G20 economies converge in terms of their growth rates, you'll see that if we're going to sustain, use an example of three percent economic growth going forward, we're going to have to see something like 5.5 percent of economic growth happening in developing countries if we're going to achieve a three percent growth rate. We have to focus on those economies going forward. That's quite a challenge. What can the G20 do for the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world in developing countries? There's two big things that they can do and the biggest is of course actually stimulating global economic growth. If you have a look around the table at those economies that are represented in the G20, half of the world's poor live in those countries. So just those economies themselves looking at stimulating economic growth will have significant impacts on global poverty rates. But having said that, there's also the actions that these economies will take that will have spillover effects into those economies that aren't necessarily around the table of the G20. So the work that the G20 is doing on taxation, the work that they're doing on investment and infrastructure, the work that's happening on banking regulations, all of these things will have positive spillover effects to the global economy and to the developing countries that will be part of an economic growth story. And so the second area that the G20 can work to assist with the world's poor is actually in its convening power. Just getting those countries around the table, having a discussion around the very difficult issues around global development, is an opportunity. If you think about the G20 and its constituency, there is something like 85% of global GDP represented around that table. There's something like three quarters of global trade represented around those tables and two thirds of the world's population is represented by the countries around that table. Just getting those countries together then and the convening power of the G20 shouldn't be underestimated. How is Australia progressing the G20's development agenda? We're looking at how the G20 in its development focus can align better all of its work. So let me give you an example. The finance ministers and the governors are looking at how we can encourage investment in infrastructure into all the countries around the world. Infrastructure is a key component to development. And so in the development working group we're saying well what is the story for low income countries and less developed countries in particular but not exclusively. What's the infrastructure story there? Part of that infrastructure story is project preparation facilities. If there aren't projects that are developed and ready to be financed they're not going to be attractive investment destinations necessarily. So what we're doing in the development working group is focusing very much on project preparation facilities. The other area is in taxation. One of the things that the development working group is looking at is the work that the finance ministers are doing generally on taxation and saying what does that mean for developing countries? What does base erosion and profit shifting really mean for developing countries? Is there things that we need to do to build the tax bases, assist countries to build their tax bases and participate in global taxation arrangements? For some countries their capacity is low and it's very difficult to see them doing that at that stage. So we're thinking also about the capacity building elements of that. Financial inclusion is another area we're looking at in development. There's so many people in this world who don't have access to the things that we take for granted. Access to a bank account, access to insurance, access to loans and other lines of credit. You can't imagine our economy without those sorts of financial services for a lot of people around the world. They are not financial services that are available. So looking at ways that we can improve that. And also looking at remittances for many developing countries. A big flow of finance is from their workers who are working in a second country and remitting their incomes back home. There are big costs associated with that remittance flow and so we really need to look at ways that we can bring down the global average cost of remittances. So that the money that is currently being a cost is actually a benefit back into the country. How is the G20 working with the United Nations for after 2015 the target date for the Millennium Development Goals? So the post 2015 development agenda as it's commonly referred to in the United Nations is a really big discussion that's going on at the moment. It is looking at what comes after the MDGs and it's also looking at how you integrate sustainable development and elements that come from the Rio conference in 1992 when in 2012 we had a 20 year anniversary of. So it's bringing together those two agendas. It's absolutely an intergovernmental process of the United Nations but a key element of the MDGs is in fact global partnerships and collaboration. And so we're looking at the role of the G20 in supporting the UN process and seeing what as an organisation or as a forum the G20 can bring to that discussion in the United Nations. Claire, thank you for your time today. Pleasure, thank you very much. And that was Claire Walsh, chair of the G20's Working Development Group.