'Down Under' moving upward

MELBOURNE -- More than 1,700 business leaders from 17 countries have assembled this week in this bustling, very European, very multicultural "second city" of Australia. Purpose: to attend an annual three-day National Trade and Investment Outlook conference to spotlight investment opportunities and provide a venue where Australian executives can network with overseas business counterparts and explore export prospects.

This year the focus is a little different. Like the U.S., increasing numbers of new jobs in Australia are being created by small and mid-sized businesses -- called SMEs -- and continued job growth requires SMEs to be globally competitive and to do a better job penetrating export markets. Accordingly, this year's conference is designed to give SME business leaders practical knowledge to whet their appetite and hone their hands-on skills to play in global markers.

The conference is also designed to change the way people think about this very rich and very large (sixth largest) but sparsely populated country of 20 million. Polls show that when people think of Australia they think of boomerangs and the outback (also the name of America's fastest-growing mid-scale family restaurant chain). They think of legendary Aussie athletes such as golfing greats Greg "the Shark" Norman and Bruce Devlin; tennis superstars Evonne Goolagong and Ken Rosewall; or world-class swimmers such as the current crop that is sweeping the world short-course swim championships this week in Rio.

Say "Australia" and people think of the Great Barrier Reef or the Olympic Games (in Melbourne in 1956 or in Sydney in 2000) or kangaroos, koalas, wallabies and wombats -- Australian marsupials that raise their young in pouches. Or they think of Crocodile Dundee or maybe even Thomas Keneally, who wrote Schindler's List.

When economists or traders think of Australia, they think of beef, sheep and wool because for many years four-fifths of Australia's export earnings came from the sale of farm goods -- primarily to Great Britain.

But many of these images are no longer true -- or only tell part of the story. Today, Australia's major trading partners are the U.S. and Japan. Mining products (primarily coal and bauxite for making aluminum) have passed farm products in export earnings -- and more than 20% of export dollars now come from manufactured goods.

Balancing the scales, the Aussies also remind you that "Down Under" Thomas Edisons invented the car radio, "black box" flight recorder, the widely used "invisible" bifocal or "progressive" lens for spectacles, and "fast ferries" -- high-powered, wave-piercing catamarans that ferry people and vehicles around many of the world's great harbors and archipelagoes -- and that Australian ingenuity and advanced science and technology have created many of the "world's first" and "world's best" products and services.

So what emerges is the picture of an inventive, productive and technologically savvy Australia that has a trade surplus with nearly every other Asian country -- and an increasingly multicultural Australia that uses the energy and know-how of its many ethnic groups to expand its connections to influential diasporas and the wider global marketplace.

The sons and daughters of the convicts and prison guards sent to settle this island continent in 1, 88 by the king of England -- when the loss of the colonies meant he could no longer relieve prison crowding by sending convicts to America -- have done very well for themselves. Even more important, the Aussies are becoming an affordable and effective base camp complete with "guides" and cultural "interpreters" for increasing numbers of Americans and Europeans who want to participate in the world's fastest-growing markets in Asia.