 Today we're joined by Chris Barrett, Australia's ambassador to the OECD, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. Chris, thanks for joining us. Good day, Tom. Chris, let's start with an easy one. What is the OECD? Well, Tom, to start with the acronym, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development is what the OECD stands for and it grew out of an organisation called the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation, which was established after World War II to essentially administer the Marshall Plan for Western Europe. And I think it's best to think of both of them by the nickname that the OECD sometimes gets, which is the economic NATO. It was really an organisation established on the economic side of the ledger, if you like, to reconstruct Western European economies after the devastation of World War II. It changed over time in nature. It became the OECD formally in 1961 and very soon after Japan joined in 1964, which changed the nature of the organisation from a very Western European focused one to a more globally focused one. And in more recent years in the 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall you had a number of the Eastern and Central European countries joining the OECD and then in around about the same time Mexico joined, so you had that expansion to a different continent. And in addition to that in recent years you've had, you know, Korea and other countries like that joining. The most recent round of countries joining the OECD were Estonia, Israel and Chile in 2010, so quite a broad membership there. And the OECD, what it does is it really, well it does what it says on the tin, it works on economic cooperation and development among the member countries. Most of that is around cooperation in the policy committees of the OECD, which are really the core of where the work of the OECD goes on. We can talk about that a bit. Thanks Chris. Now can you tell us a little bit more about Australia's role at the OECD? Well we joined the OECD in 1971 and we are essentially there to work alongside other member countries and learn the lessons of those member countries from their policy suites for use in our domestic economy and our domestic society. So we participate as a full member of the OECD in all of the OECD's policy committees and that means either someone from our mission going along to those meetings and we go along to a great many of those meetings, as I'm sure you can imagine, or people coming from policy experts coming from Canberra, from places like treasury, from places like education, employment, workplace relations, from the environment department, from the health department, from the Attorney-General's across the board. So it's a very broad participation from all departments coming to those policy committee meetings in Paris and participating in the discussions. Learning from other countries about the best practice policies that they have and seeing if they make sense for Australia to adopt and vice versa. Of course other countries I would modestly say learning a lot from Australia and how we do things. Chris, you've mentioned the committees could you tell us a little bit more about how they work and what they do? Well as I suggested before I guess the policy committees are really the core of how the OECD does business. They are in many ways the beginning and the end of the OECD's work. What happens in those policy committees is that a number of experts are invited from all of the different member countries from different departments to come and sit down and talk about a particular topic. You have not just the policy committees like for example the Economic Policy Committee which is one of the biggest and most important committees at the OECD but also Environmental Policy Committee, Health Policy Committee, Education etc. And then each of those committees will have working parties on specific things. There are working parties on bribery, there are working parties in the Trade Committee and they pick particular areas and then countries send their experts again either from our missions or from capital to come out and discuss a particular topic. They might be doing a particular piece of research that the secretariat has been working on a paper for I should add in terms of the secretariat there are about two and a half thousand people in the permanent secretariat of the OECD policy experts from all around the world who are actually employed by the OECD to do policy research and support the committee work. Our experts then go into those committees and discuss the work with other experts from around the world and then you get this very rich interchange of this particular country might have an interesting way of tackling a policy problem that we hadn't thought of before in Australia or vice versa. We have an interesting way of tackling something that other countries haven't tried or thought about and we adopt or look at each other's policies and sometimes adopt each other's policies and in that way you get this propagation of best practice among different countries which is how they do the economic cooperation and development that assists our economies and our societies. Chris could you give us a good example of how Australia's engagement with the OECD is of benefit to us? Well I think that to the extent that people know OECD products one of the ones that is most famous is a product called PISA which is the program for international student assessment. It's done by the education department of the OECD and what it is is essentially an international standardized test for school students that examines what they know about mathematics and reading and literacy all of those various different areas and then compares the results like for like across multitudes of different countries. I might add both OECD members and non OECD members for example the Shang High School system is part of the PISA survey and this is incredibly powerful information because you can look at how different countries are performing on a like for like basis and once you know that you instantly get very interested in why is a particular country doing better or worse in that survey. Now Australia as it happens does well as you would hope in the PISA survey but we've still found it very useful to study how other countries some of the countries that perform better in one area or the other what that means for about what they're doing right in their education policies and what we can explore in learning from them. So one of the things that I know it's helped to inform in the Australian context has been some of the investment that went into disadvantaged schools a few years ago very much driven in part by what we discovered from the PISA survey and how other countries handle those issues in their context so has been very useful for us in our domestic context. Chris I understand that quite a lot of Australians work in the OECD. What would you say to young Australian university students or graduates looking for a career at the OECD? Well I would say get on the OECD website. We do well in the OECD in terms of our representation working there. There are as I said about 2,500 people working in that secretariat and I think last time I looked at it we have about 100 Australians working across the OECD. Now in terms of our share of the OECD's total population we're more than double what you would expect as compared to our population share. So I would say it's a very interesting place to work and that you'd find a lot of other very smart Australians working there so it's definitely worth exploring and it's worth exploring in any case for I would say for Australian students and not just for students to look at some of the OECD's products particularly if people are students in public policy broadly economics the OECD has a lot of excellent publications good international comparisons and excellent statistics to really understand how different countries perform in different areas and what we can learn from them. Chris thanks very much for joining us. Thanks Tom. That was Chris Barrett Australia's ambassador to the organisation for economic cooperation and development the OECD in Paris.