 Today on our Ambassador Series I'm joined by Jeremy Brewer, Australia's High Commissioner to Vanuatu. Hi Commissioner, thank you for your time. Thank you David. What is the nature of Australia's relationship with Vanuatu? Well Australia and Vanuatu enjoy a very close, broad and deep relationship which covers a whole lot of areas. We've had good engagement with Vanuatu since well before independence that happened in 1980 and it's grown and developed into what's now a strong and enduring relationship, a relationship of friends, I suppose a relationship of neighbours and certainly I hope a relationship of partners. We work together on a range of different things and we have a lot of people-to-people engagement. There's many Australian tourists there, we're the largest aid donor to Vanuatu and we're also one of the major investors and trade partners of Vanuatu so there's engagements at all kinds of different levels. In which sectors is Australia providing development assistance? Well we have a pretty large program in Vanuatu. The total amount is around about $60 million, just over in fact $60 million for the year 2013-14 and I expect it'll be similar for the new financial year. We engage across a few major sectors-health, education, infrastructure. We do some work in economic governance and we have programs in the law and justice area as well which encompasses assistance to the police force there. And how have you seen the situation in Vanuatu improve? Well we've had some real successes I think in our aid program. It's always a challenging thing to deliver a complex aid program but we've for example in the last few years since about 2007 we've seen an 80% reduction in the incidence of malaria and I think anyone would regard that as a success and while we're not completely clear of malaria in Vanuatu we're very close to it I think it's fair to say. We've had some excellent outcomes from our technical, vocational and educational and training TVAT sector program which has created a large number of people with job ready qualifications or people who can start up their own businesses that's resulted in significant increases to incomes to individual people and we've seen our education assistance enable a larger number a significantly larger number of people being able to afford to send their children to school. Could you tell me about Australia's seasonal worker program? The seasonal worker program is something that was introduced a few years ago as a pilot program it's now a permanent program of the Australian government it's been supported by successive Australian governments. Vanuatu and a number of other Pacific Island countries are participating in it and Vanuatu is the second largest supplier of labour through that program it enables employers in Australia to access labour to work on in various sectors primarily horticulture but now we're introducing new ones like accommodation and aquaculture where people instead of having to rely on backpackers and people who might leave after a very short amount of time can now be sure that they will have access to reliable labour for up to six months it's very beneficial obviously to those employers and to the Australian economy because it helps those sectors to drive forward but it's particularly beneficial to the participants they earn Australian wages they can have opportunities to develop skills and experience which increase their employability later and they also are able to send significant amounts of money back to their communities in Vanuatu typically according to some studies that we've done about $6,000 Australian will go back per six month engagement per worker they invested in things like their children's education some have invested it in starting up businesses others have invested it into various community benefiting activities so it's really a win-win-win situation all over When Tropical Cyclone Lucy hit Vanuatu in March 2014 how did Australia assist Vanuatu? Tropical Cyclone Lucy was particularly devastating because of not so much the high winds that it generated but the enormous amount of rainfall and it travelled quite slowly across Vanuatu leaving some serious damage in its way particularly in certain localised areas I think over 20,000 people were affected for a time in five of Vanuatu's six provinces something like 10 people died again in some of these effects were quite localised but that was the situation that we had to respond to we worked very closely with our France partners as we called them that's France and New Zealand to help coordinate our response Australia provided an aerial surveillance mission that was able to surveil the whole country to assess the areas and identify the areas of most particular damage we provided through forward located stocks of emergency supplies a whole range of different things that they needed to help themselves rebuild and survive through the emergency all kinds of emergency supplies and we also provide an ongoing person from the Australian Civilian Corps he's a specialist in disaster recovery and he works with the National Disaster Management Office there in Port Vila to help improve their readiness and their capacity to respond to disasters of this nature and in the case of Cyclone Lucy we also deployed another Australian Civilian Corps volunteer who helped in the logistical coordination of the whole recovery effort so we kept very busy and we think that the response by the disaster authorities in Vanuatu was quite well handled too and we were very lucky to be able to work with a quite a competent partner there are vast numbers of Australians who travel to Vanuatu each year could you touch on the people to people links between Australia and Vanuatu and perhaps any travel advice that's relevant for Australians going there? sure, well I mean Vanuatu is a beautiful country and a great place for tourists, for their families, individuals to visit it has lots of natural beauty and lots of things that would attract people to come and visit it and a lot of Australians do something like 250,000 last year we think and they come by plane but increasingly they come on cruise ships Australia is I think the fastest growing cruise ship market in the world and so that has potentially a very positive impact on the Vanuatu and on its economy there are going to be, we think about 170 cruise ship visits to Port Vila this year which means virtually one every two days and those ships would carry 2,000 or so people on them on average I guess and that means that there's potentially 2,000 people coming into the town purchasing food, purchasing items, purchasing handicrafts and artworks and what have you and buying tickets to participate in activities, taxi fares all of those things that generate jobs that generate income we have been able to help Vanuatu to potentially to develop the way in which it benefits from those tourists more substantially we've got an MOU with Carnival Australia the largest cruise liner operator in the world which is designed to help provide training to Vanuatu so that they can be recruited to work on these cruise ships we are working to help them develop some accreditation mechanisms for their handicrafts, for their artwork, for other projects like coffee for example which is grown in Vanuatu to be purchased and sent back to Australia so that they can satisfy Australian quarantine requirements and with Carnival we are currently supporting an investigation into the economic benefits of cruise ship tourism so that we can understand what those benefits are how extensive they are through the economy and therefore develop mechanisms, strategies to try and I suppose increase the beneficial impact of that tourism so there's quite a bit going on and much more yet to be done in the TVET sector the technical vocational education and training sector we've also had a very active program in which we have provided people with skills and capabilities to get skills that will enable them to be employed and to start businesses in the region and that's in the industry I should say and that's worked very well too through the TVET sector program we are able to establish what we're calling the TVET centres and they're really hubs for small tourism operators in Vanuatu that would otherwise have no real way of connecting with the outside world to be known about, to be contacted and to arrange bookings from people anywhere in the world through going through these hubs these TVET centres and that's proven to be very successful as well so there's a whole range of areas where we're trying to promote and help Vanuatu to grow and benefit from its tourism industry the question about Australians in Vanuatu is a good one too I think about 250,000 Australians visited Vanuatu last year and we think probably about 3,000 are permanently resident there as expatriates I guess in terms of our advice to them Vanuatu is a very high risk country for natural disasters we have volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, floods all of those things, that's just about every kind of disaster you can imagine is potentially going to occur at Vanuatu at some point or another and if the Australian government is able to contact you to help you out to provide you with advice in the event that one of those disasters occurred it's best that we know how to do that and we can know how to do that if you register on the smarttraveller.gov.au website so that we have contact details for you and know that you're in the country for a particular period of time so I would urge all Australians to do that and I would urge all Australians to read our travel advice for Vanuatu before they travel so that they understand the kinds of issues that they face in that country which is otherwise a very safe and beautiful country to visit, I assure you Hi Commissioner, thank you for your time today A pleasure David and we look forward to your visit to Vanuatu Thank you