AIIA NSW has taken first steps to connect with business and industry groups to widen the intellectual base and provide an avenue for the various parties to share common information.

There are 3 main silos in which international information is stored:

• The AIIA is a body which has international expertise and interests, particularly in policy areas, and is an expert source of information on other countries relevant to risk assessment for businesses.
• The Business Councils and Chambers of Commerce have solid information on the commercial activities and policy of Australia’s commercial partners.
• There is a 3rd group which should be included and that is the research institutes, universities etc, but these shall be left to a later stage, and treated quite differently.

All groups have synergistic information which could be of interest and/or benefit to the other from time to time, however, rarely do these groups link and share information with the others.

The AIIA NSW has initially targeted the business groups, predominately the bilateral Business Councils and Chambers of Commerce. There are approximately 50 of these business groups in NSW so it is impractical to establish links with them all so we have initially targeted the Business Councils for Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, with the intention of linking with other business councils in the future.

While it is very early days and we are still in the process of formalising the linkages and exploring the range of activities in which we engage and could be of interest or value to a Business Council, and there are quite a few. The most obvious is the weekly presentations.

We recently co-hosted a presentation with the Australia Malaysia Business Council at which Greg Earl, the well-respected commentator journalist spoke on the politics of several of the Asean countries (reported in our news item of 22 March).
http://20.185.176.227/news-item/the-new-malaysia-2/

We expect there will be more of these, and the Business Councils will also be conducting activities which may be of interest to AIIA members.

Report by Glen Robinson, Councillor at AIIA NSW. Glen was a founding partner of a company in which he spent over 30 years providing advice and assistance to those organisations which wished to establish a commercial presence in Asean.