I believe that the United Kingdom can stay at the forefront in leading the world's growth and development and also continue to play an important and even bigger role for regional stability and global peace.

Openness has been vital to Asia's fast growth in the past and it will continue to be crucial for the area's further development.

In the past, proactive fiscal polices almost always meant just more investment and an increase in the fiscal deficit.

We must keep prices under control to ensure that price increases do not exert a major negative impact on people's lives.

If you aren't free to protect yourself - when government puts its thumb on that freedom - then you aren't free at all.

Now that we have a democracy and you can go back and the airport air is not laden with evil any more, you can actually breathe oxygen when you land in Johannesburg.

If a hurricane strikes, we can blame the president for not being there; we can blame Congress and FEMA; we can blame the state governments; but in the end, it's the mayors and the local city governments that have to be prepared for emergencies and be prepared to act.

In the 1970s, we got a Labor government that put more emphasis on trade with Asia; the Vietnam war ended, and refugees were coming in. We were more part of Asia than America and the rest of the world. There was the proximity, for a start - all these countries and cultures just north of us. It just made sense that that's what we were part of.