ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, thank you Jane, thank you Brian, for having me here and thank you Ken. Absolutely fantastic to be here. Can I pay tribute to the work that ANU is doing not only for Australia, but for this region. I think the university is going from strength-to-strength, and I take my hat off and salute the extraordinary work that you are doing. I think the university is now clearly one of the leaders in the world in so many areas. So thank you, Brian and all of your team for the work you're doing.

I'm privileged here to be able to launch this Zero-Carbon Energy Challenge for the Asia-Pacific.

Of course, it's no secret to anyone that Australia is an energy exporting superpower, and we have been for many, many years.

We've tapped into the opportunity of the need for energy security in countries to our north - Japan, of course, in particular initially, South Korea, China, right through to south-east Asia. This has been an extraordinary part of our economic success and development for many, many decades now, particularly since the Second World War.

We should be very, very proud of that achievement.

But it has to evolve, and it has evolved enormously.

We've seen just in recent years, in the course of basically a decade, we've taken new technologies and created the world's largest LNG export industry, which is an extraordinary achievement, an absolutely extraordinary achievement. We should celebrate that achievement.

We know energy is going to continue to evolve. Not only are we an energy export superpower, we are seeing extraordinary investment in renewables in this country at the moment.

In 2018, we saw the highest investment per capita of all the developed countries in the world. Not by a little, by a lot. About $514 per person - it was almost double the next country, which is, again, an extraordinary achievement.

That's creating challenges, challenges that our scientists, our engineers, our economists need to help us to address.

Remaining a world superpower in energy exports also requires problem solving. It requires hard work. It requires the sort of work that this challenge will be all about.

One of the areas that I think is most exciting for us is hydrogen. It is a long-term opportunity as well, as hopefully a short to medium term one.

We're investing as a government about $140 million in hydrogen projects around the country. There's enormous interest from our customer countries - from Japan, from South Korea, from China, from south-east Asia, needing the potential of hydrogen.

There's still a lot to learn, but there's an enormous amount we've got to work out. An enormous amount of problem solving we have to do.

I'm very hopeful that this work that will come from this challenge will play an enormously important role in maintaining our status as one of the world's great energy superpowers.

So, good luck. I wish you well. I'm sure you will do absolutely fantastic work. And I'll be watching very, very closely in the coming months and years.

Thank you.