Senator the Hon Mathias Cormann

The Governments of Australia and Germany have today signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a permanent Joint Economic Committee. 

The MOU was signed at the Asia Pacific Conference for German Business in Jakarta by the Australian Minister for Finance Mathias Cormann and the German Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy Peter Altmaier. 

The Joint Economic Committee will focus on: 

• exchanging views on macroeconomic and trade developments;
• enhancing cooperation on multilateral economic issues;
• elevating our bilateral interactions on issues arising in connection with trade, market access and investment with a special emphasis on the promotion of bilateral trade and investment; and
• facilitating cooperation between the Australian and German private sectors. 

Australia and Germany are both open market trading nations, like minded on international issues and share many core values with a mutual desire to further broaden, strengthen and deepen our bilateral relationship. 

Through the work of the Australia-Germany Advisory Group since 2014, we took stock of our bilateral relationship and have implemented many measures to boost our trade and investment relationship, our strategic engagement, our cooperation on research, science and innovation, and our people-to-people links. 

This is a further step to ensure the necessary engagement architecture is in place to continue our efforts to build an even better and stronger bilateral relationship - in particular in relation to trade and investment.