 Welcome to DFAT's Our Ambassador Series. Today we're talking to Louise Hand, our High Commissioner here in Ottawa. Thank you for your time today Louise. Thank you Tom, my pleasure. Australia and Canada have had diplomatic relations for over 70 years. How would you describe the relationship now? Well I think the outstanding thing about the relationship between Canada and Australia is that it is deeply functional. We share an enormous amount of cultural and political and historical DNA and I'm constantly surprised at the encouraging nature of the similarities and the stimulating nature of the differences. If I had to pull up a defining feature, I think I would say that it was trust. We do a lot of things with Canada that go to a fundamental and profound trust. And I guess I can give you a couple of examples. One would be the long term ongoing military cooperation. We have ongoing defence ties that are very broad and well understood. On the intelligence front, we in Canada with others share a very long standing and trusted intelligence relationship and we work with them on all the modern intelligence issues and that's counter-terrorism and people smuggling and the cyber issues. So it's a relationship that starts with this trust and then adapts to the new issues as they come over the horizon. We also trust Canada on something that really goes to the heart of Australian values and that is on consular services. When Australians are in trouble in a foreign country, you really want them looked after, you really want someone to be able to help them if they're ill or dying or subject to some horrible crime or just simply lost their passport. And we look after Canada in 22 countries where it doesn't have a representation and they look after us and our Australians who are in trouble in 20 other countries. And we do everything we can to work with Canada on our shared values which is for a world that is safe and prosperous and free of poverty and conflict. Could you describe for us some of the key features of the relationship? Well the relationship is conducted at so many levels and there's such a strong flow of advice and information and productivity all the way down. It really starts with our Prime Ministers, Prime Minister Gillard and Prime Minister Harbour who meet regularly throughout the year in the context of the G20 and APEC. And then we have our Foreign Ministers who work together extensively despite some differences in policy on the United Nations, the Commonwealth and then all kinds of other subsidiary bodies that relate to our shared aspirations for the world. I think you'd find that Canada and Australia really have very similar aspirations in regard to the security of people bringing countries out of poverty, helping with their development in the most sort of constructive and ethical way. And we often find that our Foreign Ministers are having those kinds of conversations. Another aspect of our relationship with Canada relates to the public sector. Both Canada and Australia have very similar values about what a public sector should provide, what its standard should be, how the governance should run, how it should be answerable to their citizens. And we have a dialogue between our secretaries, our departmental secretaries come to Canada and the Canadian counterparts meet them. They have a retreat and we found this year that the quality of the dialogue was quite wonderful. We have shared interests and shared challenges. We both have very significant resource sectors. We have similar demographic in terms of an ageing population and also populations that have people from many different countries and speak many different languages. Both of us have Indigenous people who have their own claims for the way that they want to live. And we have productivity challenges that come from years of success and what we do next. So our secretaries were able to have the kind of conversation I don't think they can have with anyone else. So that is now threaded again right into the relationship. How do you describe the bilateral trade relationship? The bilateral trade relationship is an interesting one because both of our trading characteristics are completely defined by the geopolitical realities of where and whom we are. Canada lives next door to the US. This is massively moulded, the style and kind of trade that Canada does. The US ambassador says, somewhat smugly I think, that Canada and US have the largest bilateral trading relationship in the history of the world. We on the other hand have built a trade profile that reflects our own geopolitical reality which is our part of the world. That said, Australia and Canada have a number of things in common. We have taken on big resource challenges and very highly educated workforces. So in some things we are competitors but there is I think a sort of modern dimension of investment where Australia and Canada do extremely well and are likely to do more in future. I give this an example of superannuation funds. Australia has an enormous amount of superannuation money invested here in Canada. It's a trusted market and Canada equally has an enormous amount of superannuation money invested in Australia. Groups like the Ontario teachers own large chunks of New South Wales, much to my amusement when I first heard it. And this is something that I think will be a very important market going forward. It's not insignificant, it runs to tens of billions of dollars. We also work with Canada in third countries on these kinds of complex and long-term investment scenarios. So the trade reflects the realities but I think it's got a very interesting modern dimension that will be worth following. Australia and Canada have always had very strong people-to-people links through education, tourism and working holidaymaker skins. Can you tell us a little bit more about this? People-to-people links between Australia and Canada have got to be one of the easiest symbols ever for a head of mission. A recent survey published here in Canada ranked countries according to how warmly Canadians felt about them and you'll be pleased to know that Australia is at the top of the list. So I don't have to do much persuading around here. The other thing is that we have thousands and thousands of Australians in Canada and I was told recently by the Canadian Minister for Trade at FAST that in Whistler and Banff during the ski season you cannot get a hot chocolate beer ski pass without it being delivered to you in an Australian accent. So it's entirely free-range and organic, these people-to-people links but even so we do have in place some great structures to support it. There's over 200 agreements between Australian and Canadian universities, four more agreements. There's room for us to be able to get a better harmonisation of university qualifications between the two countries. Again, I do like to think of Captain Cook as having set the pace on this. He spent time in Canada, went to Australia and presumably came back again. So I think for Australia, like Canada, it's a wonderful cultural characteristic that we spend time in each other's countries. So they're very warm, there's plenty of room to make them better and I find the Canadians are entirely open to our overtures. You've had a number of postings in both Europe and Asia before coming to Canada. How would you compare your experiences thus far? Well, you know, on a personal level, one of the wonderful things about this profession is that you're constantly doing something that you've never done before and that is different in all kinds of fundamental ways. For an Australian professional, you know, foreign and trade policy person, time in Asia, as I've done in Jakarta and Cambodia, is an absolute investment in Australia's future. Australian diplomats understand this very well. Multilateral work, of course, which I've done in arms control and disarmament and latterly climate change is also wonderfully instructive for an Australian because you do have these genuine practical opportunities to exert middle-planned diplomacy in a global setting. And Australians are good, we're good at this. You know, we've got languages, we've got intellectual balance, we've got people who do wonderful briefing for us back home. We can pull together ideas across regional groups and we can get outcomes. So that's another, you know, I think a great thing to have some experience in. I had not worked in North America before and to be in Canada at the time, it's suddenly taken a whole new interest in our part of the world. It's just a great time, you know. So I'm in a place that's close to the US, close to Latin America. I've got a view of the Caribbean from here. And, you know, Canada is a very interesting prison through which to see all of that but also to experience Canada's thinking at the time it's doing these, I think, probably fundamental policy shifts. That's terrific. Thank you very much for talking to us today, Louise.