 Today in the Our Ambassadors series we're joined by Bronte Moules, Australia's Ambassador to Myanmar. Thanks very much for joining us, Bronte. Thank you. Myanmar's been getting a lot of international attention recently. What's behind that increasing interest in the country? Well Myanmar's undergoing some of the most significant changes since its independence in 1948. It's a country coming out of decades of isolation. It's trying to open up to the world and it's trying to reform politically and economically. So it's going to be a long and hard process for Myanmar, but it's got better prospects now for developing positively than it has for some 50 years. What's Australia's response to that? We're very supportive of it. We want Myanmar to prosper. We want to see the lives of the people of Myanmar improve. It's a country of our region so we have a lot of direct interest in it. We very much welcome the President of Myanmar's reform agenda. He's taking some very bold steps in terms of things like inclusive political participation, where we now see Aung San Suu Kyi as a member of parliament. But in many other areas too, on economic reform, on releasing political prisoners, on allowing trade unions to form, on easing media restrictions, many different areas where the reform agenda is being pursued. It's something we very much support. The thing is though that Myanmar is not going to be able to succeed in its reform agenda without international support, and that's why we're engaging more. And it's one of the reasons, for example, why Australia took the decision to lift our sanctions against Myanmar a few months ago. So how do we balance that expanding engagement with the human rights concerns that are still present? We're finding that we now have a stronger platform in fact to engage on human rights and other issues, and where we have concerns, where concerns arise, we have a stronger platform to have that sort of dialogue. So we have a much more direct and frank form of engagement under this new government than we've had with the previous regime. It also, this increased engagement means that we can provide human rights training and this greater engagement overall does allow us to help promote a more transparent and accountable environment. So how's Australia supporting Myanmar's development? Well, we're significantly expanding our development assistance. We're increasing our aid program to around $100 million a year by 2015. We're the big focus on trying to lift some of the people of Myanmar out of poverty. Myanmar has around, in fact around 25% of the population live in poverty. And it has some other very, very concerning indicators. For example, around 70,000 Myanmar children under the age of 5 die each year of largely preventable causes. Around half the children don't finish primary school. So we're looking at a big focus on health and education as well as livelihoods and agriculture. So that's a big part of our assistance. We're also changing the way we engage and the way we deliver our aid. We're still working very closely with UN agencies, with NGOs, with civil society but we're engaging more closely now with the government itself to try to increase its own capacity to deliver social services. We're also supporting the peace process in Myanmar. The government's making efforts to try to address some very long-standing ethnic conflict in border areas and we're providing around $5 million overall to support the peace process. With the increased international focus now on Myanmar, is that translating into more business interest in the country as well? Yes, well in fact we're seeing a surge in inquiries from Australian companies who are interested in Myanmar. At this stage a lot of them are very much in scoping mode. It's still a high-risk place and quite a difficult place to do business but the international commercial interest is very strong because of the government's, Myanmar government's stated commitment to reform because of the easing and lifting of some western sanctions and also because of the country's potential. This is a country, a resource which we can't, a country of around 50 to 60 million people geostrategically located between India and China and the rest of Southeast Asia. So it has enormous potential and this is getting a lot of commercial interest. So what then are some of the other ways that the Australian-Myanmar relationship is changing? Well it's changing in many ways. We're having more high level visits for example. We've had two visits by Australian foreign ministers in the last year. In the previous decade we had no ministerial visits so high level exchanges are increasing. We've had an Australian parliamentary delegation visit Myanmar recently. We have both the speakers of the Myanmar parliament visiting Australia and we've invited the president and Aung San Suu Kyi to visit and we hope that takes place soon too. We're also doing things like we've revived our scholarships program. As I mentioned we're doing human rights training. We're seeing a lot more interest from Australian education institutions too as Myanmar's education sector opens up and we're branching out to some other new areas. For example we're providing some training to some Myanmar conservation experts to try to help them conserve what's quite a spectacular historical buildings around downtown Rangoon. So that's another area where we're working on. And so just finally what do you think is the future for the relationship between Australia and Myanmar? Well depending on the success of this massive reform agenda that the country is pursuing there's a potential for Myanmar to become a much more important partner for Australia with much closer relations. As a regional partner I think Myanmar's role in ASEAN will get stronger and stronger but also as a bilateral partner obviously in areas like trade and education but also tourism linkages. We're seeing an increasing number of Australians wanted to visit Myanmar now that the country's opening up and on that point I'd just note the importance obviously of Australians taking out insurance and registering on our smart traveller website. Thanks very much Bronte. Thank you. And that was Bronte Malls, Australia's ambassador to Myanmar.