Kevin Rudd (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade and International Security) Share this | Hansard source

and saying he was running on a platform of ‘Bob Katter, New Liberal candidate for Kennedy’? Can you just imagine the impact across rural Australia? We are having this debate because the National Party itself as an institution is collapsing before our eyes and the political authority of the Deputy Prime Minister, as a consequence, is collapsing before our eyes. He got some advice today from Senator Boswell in the Senate. Senator Boswell’s advice was this: ‘Mark, resign.’ That was the advice.

If you have look at the trade figures over which the Minister for Trade has presided in his period since the year 2000, the trade figures of themselves suggest he do nothing else other than resign. Since he has been trade minister of the Commonwealth of Australia, we have registered 49 consecutive monthly trade deficits, contributing to a $20 billion annual trade deficit, contributing to a $55 billion current account deficit and contributing to a record half trillion dollar foreign debt. And this trade minister thinks there is no case to answer.

Dig down into the detail of what our Minister for Trade and Deputy Prime Minister has presided over. This is where, colleagues, it gets interesting—comparing the basic export data during this minister’s custodianship of the trade portfolio and those who have preceded him. Let us look at total exports. Between 1983 and 1996 total exports from Australia grew annually on average by 8.1 per cent. That was our period in government. In the first four years after we lost government and the other mob took over—that is, between 1996 and 2000—that slowed to four per cent annual growth. Guess what has happened since 2000. Since this trade minister has occupied the portfolio, which is now six years, growth in exports is now just over 1.6 per cent per annum. Let me frame it for you again: 8.1 per cent per annum under us, four per cent per annum under his predecessors and now 1.6 per cent per annum during his six years in the job.

When you go through the individual parts of the export profile of this country the data is just as disastrous. Elaborately transformed manufactures achieved 12.9 per cent annual average growth under us and 5.3 per cent growth between 1996 and 2000. But since the year 2000 elaborately transformed manufactures exports have slowed further to only 3.6 per cent per annum. Go to rural exports. You would think that in this area the Deputy Prime Minister would excel. Average annual export growth from 1983 to 1996 was 4.8 per cent, slowing to 1.9 per cent between 1996 and 2000. But guess what has happened since 2000. They have actually gone south. They have gone into negative, recording an average annual decline in growth of 2.4 per cent per annum.

Let us go on to minerals and metals exports, and remember that this government has had the happy happenstance of being in office when we have had record terms of trade, for which they can claim no credit—that is just a function of the international market. Between 1983 and 1996 minerals and metals exports had an average annual growth of 6.5 per cent per annum, slowing to 3.6 per cent per annum in 1996-2000. But since 2000 and this minister’s six years at the table, it has gone down to 1.3 per cent annual growth. Again, it is a collapse. You see it across each category of exports.

Let us go finally to services. This is the great long-term hope of the Australian economy: how do we boost services exports? Services exports when we were in office between 1983 and 1996 grew by nine per cent per year. Between 1996-2000, before this minister took over, they grew by just two per cent per year. In the six years since this minister has taken over, they have declined at an average rate of 0.3 per cent per year.

Across the categories—not just exports as a whole but across rural exports, mining exports, elaborately transformed manufactures and across services exports—the pattern is the same: robust export growth under us, where a government believed it had a job to do in encouraging exports by concrete things in industry policy and elsewhere, and decline under a government which has now taken its hands off the policy levers altogether, resulting in a performance against all categories of exports that is sad and sorry indeed.

This minister says that his other great policy achievement, before he exits the portfolio and takes Bos’s suggestion in the Senate, is the free trade agreement with the United States. Let us have a quick look at how that one has gone. In the first 12 months of the operation of the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement exports to the US fell by $280 million in year average terms while imports from the United States—what?—grew by close to $870 million in year average terms, with the net result that Australia’s trade deficit with United States increased by $1.1 billion or 11 per cent to a total of $12 billion. This is the US free trade agreement.

How many times have we heard this Minister for Trade, the Minister for Foreign Affairs or the Prime Minister stand at that dispatch box and say, ‘This is the greatest thing since sliced bread’? Yet in the first year that the numbers flow through, Australian exports to the US are down, imports from United States are up and going through the roof, the result being that our bilateral trade deficit has got worse. This is the USFTA, where here we have a National Party Minister for Trade, a National Party Deputy Prime Minister, who could not even get our American cousins to let in one extra bit of sugar. Sugar was completely off the table. How can you be a self-respecting National Party Minister for Trade and front up to the Americans and say, ‘Okay, roll over, tickle my tummy, there will be no sugar additionally exported to the United States.’ I have to say on that one as well that it is pretty pathetic.

The trade minister’s other boast a year or two into his occupancy of this portfolio was particularly interesting. It was that the trade minister was going to do what, Mark? What were you going to do for the number of exporters in Australia?

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