That’s funded by the government because we’re taking this bid very seriously and the reason we need him to do that in the air force jet is because Covid is running rampant in Europe, and this is a very important position, and the OECD is going to play a really important role in the global economic recovery.
There really wasn’t the practical option to use commercial flights in the time we had available, because of Covid. If Mathias was flying around on commercial planes, he would have got Covid. The risk of that was extremely high.
This is about safety. It’s about health but it’s also about campaigning for a position that Alexander Downer was telling me the other night, our longest serving foreign minister, that Australia has never secured such a position before.
Now we’re in the race for it, and it will be very important, Mathias would be an outstanding secretary general of the OECD standing up for those liberal democratic market-based values, which the OECD represents that are going to be so important for the economic recovery.
The Covid environment has really demanded this probably more than anything else.
