Senator the Hon Simon Birmingham

Thanks so much Ben for the opportunity to be here with you today for this announcement by MTX. It's wonderful to be here with my great friend in South Australia's Premier of Steven Marshall, who from what I gather of his diary schedule today has been on something of a jobs and investment binge today across different part of Adelaide with different investors and throughout the course of this week, I gather with so many venture capitalists and others in town exploring the opportunities that exist right here. I see Steven's colleague, Stephen Patterson the state minister for trade and industry here alongside the vice chancellor of the University of Adelaide, Professor Peter Hoj. Always wonderful to see my long standing friend. I've known Peter longer that I've known Steven Marshall, actually for anybody in the room who wants to keep tabs on these things and so on.

Ben it's about you and MTX and the wonderful announcement that you're making today, having chosen Australia as your hub or the Asia Pac expansion of MTX and having chosen Adelaide as the place to base that hub and to make sure that you grow from here. From here of course on the exciting Lot 14 site that has seen so much development occur. Bringing these sorts of investments to Adelaide, to Australia and creating the type of leveraging growth potential to see more and more come and follow also as a result of the investment work happening. As a Federal Government we are thrilled to see this vote of confidence in Australia and as a South Australian Senator of course I am parochially thrilled to see the vote of confidence in Adelaide. It aligns so much with strategies that we have been deploying as a Government. The investments that we've made in the Centre of Machine Learning. The announcement that was made in last October's budget, has delivered a newly established Centre for Augmented Reasoning. $1.2 billion announcement made just this week in the lead up to next week's budget around our Digital Economy Strategy and at the heart of that the potential for further investment and further leveraging Australia's outstanding skills in artificial intelligence.

All of that is about two things at it's heart. More jobs and better lives. That's what all of the work and investment in these areas of science, technology, digital and technological capability ultimately comes down too. Ensuring that across Australia we create an environment where we are attracting the investment that creates more jobs for Australians and more jobs in sectors that provide better services, greater productivity, benefits to the lives of Australians and people around the world. And the exciting thing about companies like MTX being based here, is that they operate very much as export hubs as well. To hear about the work that they will be doing, not just servicing Australian clients and winning new work across Asia Pacific. But leveraging the time zone opportunities to be able to be doing work for their global customers in different parts of the world from here in Adelaide, right from the get go. That is a scale up and start up employing a couple of dozen, growing into a couple of hundred and moving through a couple of thousand employees - that will be about supplying services from day one to international customers who are using the skills and talents of the workforce from here in Adelaide, South Australia.

Thank you for what you're doing in driving this, thank you in particular to the MTX leadership for choosing Adelaide and Australia as a place to drive this investment. And we look forward to seeing the opportunities that it creates in generating the additional jobs that have been promised. But in also becoming another point of leverage that no doubt will see more like minded businesses come through, and especially help the thriving start-up culture that we're seeing around here in Lot 14 by bringing other innovators, entrepreneurs up and giving them the opportunity to partner with world leaders like yourselves.

Thanks very much again for the chance to be here.