Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, just occasionally! You would be pleased to know, Mr Deputy Speaker McMullan, that we played the New Zealanders in Wellington earlier this year and they beat us and then we played them at Ballymore and beat them, so we are ‘eqs’! And we will have further games next year. But this report is about trade, not sport, and the facts back up the quality of this trade relationship. My friend has spoken about the closeness of that relationship. The CER is the oldest of Australia’s four FTAs and is generally described as a world-class trade agreement. In a 1998 trade policy review, the WTO described it as ‘the world’s most comprehensive, effective and multilaterally compatible free trade agreement’. In its submission the New Zealand-Australia Connections Research Centre stated simply:

CER represents the model for other free trade agreements.

This trade agreement helps to facilitate what is a very close and very extensive trading relationship between these two countries. In 2005 trans-Tasman merchandise trade topped $14.4 billion while services trade was $4.7 billion.

New Zealand is Australia’s fifth largest export market. There are a whole lot of details within the report, but I will not pursue those for the same reason given by the member for Cook. However, we need to understand how important this trading relationship is to us. Frankly, it is underestimated by many people and taken for granted, and I think we need to acknowledge it a lot more. One of the issues which arose—now is probably not a bad time to talk about it—during our inquiry was what we thought was the real need for Australian parliamentarians to work a lot closer with New Zealand parliamentarians. One of the thoughts we had while writing this report was the need for Australian parliamentary committees to have a closer working relationship with their New Zealand counterparts and, to facilitate that, to treat New Zealand as a domestic airfare for the purpose of parliamentary travel so that official business could be done on the basis of committees flying to New Zealand as though they were flying to Perth. There is no reason why that should not happen, given the objective of a closer economic relationship. That is a recommendation within the body of the report.

The report itself looks at many aspects of the trading partnership, and I will not go into that any further. I do just want to say again that the report is the result of some quite dedicated work done by the committee. Rob Little, who drafted the report for us, did an excellent job. I would like to voice my appreciation to all those who provided submissions and also to the New Zealand government ministers, officials and industry leaders who made the time available to share their knowledge with the delegation during its trip to Auckland and Wellington in July this year. I also acknowledge the support given to us by the Australian High Commission in New Zealand and the hospitality of John Douth, the high commissioner, whom many of us knew previously as Head of Mission to the UN. But has worked in this place, in the first instance, as chief of staff of Gareth Evans, as I recall, before obviously continuing his long and very professional career in the foreign service. I would like to thank him and the high commission staff in New Zealand for their support as well.

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