Summary Paper: Engaging Australia’s Southeast Asian Business Community

Bringing together representatives from Australia's Southeast Asian diaspora communities to talk in particular about how we can connect that expertise with other parts of the community, other Australian businesses to build trade investment ties to the region.

Diaspora play a huge role in the relationship between ASEAN and Australia. We can be the catalyst of confidence to come into Australia and do business with Australia. We become like a tour guide, I guess.

In 2024, I would love to see more activities coming in from both sides focusing on the green economy and then also see more delegation coming from the Southeast Asia region to explore the investment opportunity into Australia as well.

I'm really excited about the prospect that Melbourne has got a diverse community of diaspora already here. We've got significant opportunities to improve with bilateral trade.

One key takeaway that I got was we're so categorised by a nation. If we were all to work together as a more integrated region and not even having to separate Australia as a plus one, then we would certainly achieve a lot more.

Incredible discussion today. I was blown away by the amount of community development that's occurring in the ASEAN diaspora.

The pain points are that there's not enough top-level leadership. Maybe one way we can do that is a grassroots approach that might be heard by the top.

We know that for business trade and investment to happen, we need to hear from business leaders from the diaspora and make sure that those people-to-people links are strong. But more than that, we want to hear how can government and industry support our diaspora leaders and provide people with the agency to do exactly what they need. So hopefully those key themes will come out today.