Hi, everyone.

First, if I may, I want to acknowledge the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation and pay my respects to the traditional custodian of the land. I pay my respects to elders both past and present, and I also want to pay my respects to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may be here today.

Thank you to the organisers of the event – the Embassy of Spain, in collaboration with the Spanish Chamber of Commerce and the Spanish Business Council.

I also note here the presence of ACCI. Andrew McIntyre, thank you very much for your time today; and, if I may, it is a pleasure to be able to provide closing remarks alongside my counterpart, Hon Reyes Maroto, Spain’s Minister for Industry, Trade and Tourism. But before I start, I want to try this if I may.

Bienvenida a la Ministra Maroto Illera. Gracias por su visita a Australia, espero que haya sido util e informativo.

Me gustaría agradecerles a todos por su participación en este evento importante. Espero que hayan hecho nuevas amistades que resulten en más comercio y relaciones más fuertes entre nuestras naciones.

Tenemos mucho en común, España y Australia, y eventos como este nos ayudan a encontrar más formas de trabajar juntos y apoyar al uno al otro.

Being from a European background myself, my parents coming here from Yugoslavia, I always learned the value of being able to speak in someone’s mother tongue, and I very much am grateful for the fact that our nation is very multicultural and brings together a lot people from different parts of the world.

My dad was a welder. When he came out here, he first learnt Italian and the first word he learnt was “mangia”, which everyone knows food is the best connection between nations and then learnt that there were a lot of Spanish people who worked on that project, and he worked elsewhere, and we always valued that. So, what I did is I basically – for a lot of Spanish speakers here, you’d know – I attempted in very bad Spanish to welcome the Minister and thank you for your participation in this event.

We are very committed to a strong business and trade relationship with your nation. It’s grown over the past few years with a number of new projects that you referenced through the course of your contribution today. This week I’m visiting Australian‑based company Gelion, which has a non‑flow zinc‑bromide energy storage technology, which was spun out of the University of Sydney. I’ve seen them previously. We’re now going to be visiting them in Western Sydney tomorrow. You talked a lot about energy storage. This is a big issue for us, and we have a lot of the critical minerals and rare earths that can go into the production of a battery. We want to manufacture them here, and we want to manufacture them some more, so I took to the election, we want to create a manufacturing precinct up near one of our largest ports in Gladstone and we also want to develop a longer-term battery manufacture strategy, and we’ll be releasing some details about that.

But firms like Gelion, they’ve been selected to trial their Endure batteries at a solar farm in northern Spain and they were chosen for the Spanish trial by Acciona Energy as part of the renewable giant’s innovation program – or ion‑vation program, I should say – which aims to unearth innovative solutions in energy storage. It’s just one of a number of examples of how Australia and Spain are building this partnership on renewables. As you mentioned, we have a lot where we can work together, and it is a partnership that makes sense. Our countries are gifted with ample renewable energy resources and expertise, and this has led to other substantial investments in Australia by very big Spanish companies, which we’ve been grateful for. For instance, Acciona, they also plan to massively expand their investment in renewable projects over the next five years. They’re currently constructing Australia’s largest wind farm, one gigawatt, MacIntyre complex on Queensland’s southern tip with a price tag just shy of $2 billion, which is a considerable investment. The company plans to increase its renewable capacity six‑fold, targeting six gigawatts with an investment forecast sitting at $26 billion, which is tremendous, and we’re very grateful for it.

The other one, Iberdrola, has announced that it will – did I say that right? Yeah; okay – investing $4.4 billion into Australia’s clean energy transition, renewables, storage networks, green hydrogen and they aim to lift renewable – their renewable portfolio in Australia to 4 gigawatts in the coming years, and following on from your comments, particularly in green hydrogen. And their investment includes batteries as well and they work with our Australian Renewable Energy Agency to deliver the Lake Bonney Battery in South Australia as well, and they agreed with TransGrid to operate the Wallgrove battery in New South Wales, which is just west of here.

It underlines how important energy storage systems, chiefly batteries, are central to transforming the electricity and transport system to make use of this potential, and both Spain and Australia are aiming for net zero by 2050.

We are putting the nation in a position to capitalise with the things I mentioned earlier around our Australian‑made battery plan, and the $100 million we had planned to invest in the precinct in Queensland. And for our nation, our future batteries, battery industry cooperative research centre estimates that the battery industry could contribute $7.4 billion by 2030 and create up to 35,000 jobs, so this is very big. As we said, we have the priority to reduce emissions to play a part in the international effort to achieve that, but also to be able to create industry and jobs benefit as well. So very important too. And, again, there’ll be further opportunities for your two nations to cooperate.

And it’s also worth mentioning our research and tax incentive which encourages businesses to invest more in research and development activity based in the broad economy, providing 11,000 businesses of all sizes nearly around $2.7 billion in tax offsets. This support may be accessed by Spanish companies that are resident in Australia for taxation purposes or which carry business in Australia through a permanent establishment. And there is also complementarity between Australian and EU member states and economies, and further integrations via the Free Trade Agreement will drive important outcomes for both our countries.

I did express to the Minister in our bilateral talks the gratitude we have when our Prime Minister met with Prime Minister Sanchez, we extended to him on behalf of our nation to yours, the gratitude for your assistance in helping finalise or working towards the finalisation of the Free Trade Agreement. We’re very grateful for that.

We do have, if I may say, I listened with interest to your reference to the start-up act, following this. I think this is really important for us too. We have recently had studies done by our Treasury in Australia that talked about the need to inject new business dynamism in this country that is flagged. After this, I am going to an initiative I’m proud to announce – we’re doing a consultation around the plan we want to bring in to encourage our university students to stay on one extra year in university, and we are going to call it a start-up year. And we’ll extend to them a financing platform via debt through what we – we have a university loan scheme called HECS – and working with incubators and accelerators to stay on and create their own businesses. We want 2,000 new businesses, start-ups to be created. And the reason is because technology, as you indicated, digitisation – a big part of your platform, a big part of ours – can improve the operation of the entire economy. We’ve targeted we want to create or see the creation of new jobs. Particularly we want 1.2 million tech‑related jobs in this country by 2030.

The reason why we want this to be embed across all the industries in this nation is because it sharpens up their operations, drives greater efficiency, but importantly problem‑solving. Where there are issues, where there are problems to be fixed, that mentality, the attitude that exists with the application of technology to sort that, is very important. That start-up year where we can send a signal: the Government values the role of entrepreneurism in the economy to create new firms, to problem‑solve and to use technology to drive much better outcomes is really important. It’s one in many initiatives we’re looking as a new Government. But we do want to work with business and I was very grateful as we were, the Australian Government, for the business sector here and in particular, if I can reference ACCI, their participation in the Jobs and Skills Summit, which is designed to boost, in particular, ways in which we can find skilled people and help industry grow here in this country, which is why I was asking about skill shortage issues when we talked.

We want business, unions, civil society to work together. We’ve got big ambitions to grow the nation, its well-being and its economy, and we need to work together to achieve it. And where we have partners, internationally who are willing, as you have generously said today to work with us, we are very keen to work back. And because you invited me to Spain, I’m definitely coming.