EO&E...................

Colleagues, good morning and welcome to my home state of Queensland. We're on the Gold Coast; obviously it's not a bad winter by some standards and I'm very pleased that you've all been able to make it. Thank you very much for the effort, particularly those who have travelled significant distances to be here.

All of us right across the western world face threats; whether it's in relation to returning foreign fighters, children being exploited online, whether it's transnational crime, foreign interference, all of these threats are with us and we have in our country been able to thwart 14 attempted terrorist attacks in recent years and the Australian people know that that is only possible because of the assistance of people and countries represented around the table this morning.

So my first point is to say thank you very much for the collaboration over a long period of time; that relationships with our five best friends in the world go back many decades – some longer than others – but nonetheless our focus on the future is one of focus on shared values, on beliefs, on our system of democracy and way of life that we seek to preserve and we do that best, when we're in lockstep together. We can stare threats down, we exchange information in a way that few other countries do and as a result peoples of our respective countries are safer.

So thank you all very much for being here. There's a substantive agenda for us to go through.