today we're joined by Chris Barrett Australias ambassador to the OECD the
organisation of economic cooperation and development in Paris
Chris thanks for joining us
g'day Tom
ah Chris let's start with an easy one
what is the OECD
well uh... Tom to start with the acronym um... the organization for economic
cooperation and development uh... is what the OECD stands for uh...
and it grew out of an organization called the organization for european
economic cooperation
which was established after world war two
uh... to essentially administer the marshall plan
for western europe
uh... and ah i think it is best to think of both of them by the nick name
that the OECD sometimes gets which is
the economic NATO
it was really an organization established on the economic side of the
ledger if you like
to reconstruct
western european economies uh... after the uh... devastation of world war two
ah
uh... it changed over time in nature it became the OECD formally in
nineteen sixty one
and very soon after
Japan joined
uh... in nineteen sixty four which changed the nature of the organization
from a very western european focused one to
a more globally focused one
uh... and in more recent years in the nineteen nineties after the fall of the
Berlin wall you had a number of the eastern and central european
uh... countries joining the OECD
uh... and then in uh... around about the sametime Mexico joined so you had that
expansion to a different continent
uh... and in addition to that in recent years you've had uh...
Korea uh... and other countries like that joining
the most recent round of uh um countries joining the OECD were
Estonia Israel and Chille in two thousand and ten so quiete a broad
membership uh... there and
uh... the OECD what it does is it really
well it does what it says on the tin works on economic cooperation and
development among member countries
uh... most of that is around cooperation in the policy committees of
the OECD which are really the core of where the work of the OECD goes
on
we can talk about that a bit
thanks Chris now can you tell us a little bit more about
Australia's role at the OECD
well we joined the OECD in nineteen seventy one
uh... and uh we are esentially there to work alongside other member
countries and learn the lessons of those member countries
uh... from their policy suites
uh... for use in our domestic economy and our domestic society
so we participate as a full member of the OECD in all of the OECDs
policy committees
uh... and that means either someone from our mission going along to those
meetings and we go along to a great many of those meetings as I am sure you can
imagine
uh...
or people coming from ah policy experts coming from Canberra coming from places like
treasury from places like
uh... education employment workplace relations
from the environment department uh... from the health department
uh... from attorney generals across the across the board so it's a
very broad participation from all departments coming to those policy
committee meetings
uh... in Paris and participating in the discussions
learning from other countries about the best practice policies that they
have and seeing if they make sense for Australia to adopt and vice versa of
course other countries
uh...I would modestly say are learning a lot from Australia and how we do things
ah Chris you have mentioned the committee's could you tell us a little bit more about
how they work and what they do
well as I suggested before I guess the policy committees are really the core of
how the OECD
does business
uh...
uh... by uh... they are in many ways the beginning and the end of the OECD
work
um what happens in those policy committees
is that uh... a number of experts are invited from all of the different
member countries from
uh... different departments
uh... to come and sit down and talk about a particular topic
you have not just the policy committees like for example the economic policy
committee which is one of the biggest and most important uh... committees at
the OECD but also the
environmental policy committee health policy committee education etcetera
and then each of those committees will have working parties on specific things there
are working parties on bribery there are working parties in the trade
committee
uh... and
they pick particular areas
and then countries send their experts again either from our missions or from capital
to come out and discuss a particular topic they might be doing a particular piece
of research
that the secretariat has been working on a paper
uh... for I should add in terms of the secretariat there are about
two-and-a-half thousand people
in the permanent secretariat of the OECD policy experts from all around
the world
uh... who actually employed by the OECD to do policy research and
support the committee work
our experts then go into those committees and discuss the work with uh... other
experts from around the world
and then you get this very rich
interchange of
uh... this particular country might have an interesting way of tackling a policy
problem that we hadn't thought of before in Australia or vice versa
we have an interesting way of tackling something
that other countries haven't tried or thought about
and we adopt or look at each other's policies and sometimes adopt each others
policies and in that why you get
this propagation of best practice
uh... among different countries which is uh... how they do
uh... the economic cooperation and development that assists our economies
and uh... our societies
Chris could you give us a good example of how Australias engagement with the OECD
is of benefit to us
uh... well i think that uh... to the extent that people know OECD
products one of the ones that is most famous is a product called
PISA which is program for international student assessment
uh... it's done by the education department of the OECD what it
is esentially is an international standardized test
for school students
uh... that examines
what they know about mathematics and reading and uh... literacy all of those
various different areas
and then compares
the results like for like across multitudes of different countries I might add
both OECD members and non OECD members for example
shanghai school system is part of uh... PISA survey
and this is incredibly powerful information because you can look at
how different countries are performing on a like for like basis and once you
know that you instantly get very interested in why a particular
country doing better or worse in that survey
now Australia as it happens does well as you would hope the in the uh... PISA
survey
uh... but we've still found it very useful to study how other countries
some of the countries that perform better in one area or the other
uh... what that means for the that what they're doing right in their education
policies and what we can explore
in learning from them
so one of the things that I know it's uh... helped to inform
in the Australian context is some of the investment that went into
disadvantaged schools a few years ago very much driven
uh... in part
by what we've discovered from the PISA survey and how other countries
handle uh... those issues ah in their context has been very useful for us
in our domestic context
Chris I understand that quiete a lot of Australians work in the OECD
what would you say to young Australian university students or graduates
looking for a career at the OECD
well I would say get on the OCED website we do well uh.. in the OECD
in terms of our representation working there
uh... there are as i said about two thousand five hundred people working in
that secretariat and I think um...last time I looked at it we have
about a hundred Australians working across the OECD now in terms of
our share
of the OECDs
total population where more than double
uh... what you would expect uh... as compared to our poulation share
so i would say its a very interesting uh... place to work
uh... and that you find a lot of other very smart Australians working there so
it's definitely worth exploring and it's worth exploring
uh... in any case for I would say for Australian students and not just for students
to look at some of the OECDs products particularly if
uh... people are students in public policy broadly
economics
uh... the OECD has a lot of excellent publications good international
comparisons and excellent statistics
uh... to really understand how different countries perform in different areas
and what we can learn from them
Chris thanks very much for joining us thanks Tom
that was Chris Barrett Australias Ambassador to the organisation for
economic cooperation and development the OECD in Paris