Ian Macfarlane (Groom, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I shall not take all the 19 minutes generously allocated by the trade minister, for there is other business which this House needs to deal with this afternoon, bearing in mind that tomorrow is an RDO for the ministers on the other side.

It is obvious from the diatribe delivered by the minister for trade that he has spent little time both as shadow Treasurer and as shadow trade minister actually getting an understanding of the economy and of how economic investment and return cycles actually work. I am also alarmed that, as the minister for trade, he continues to talk down, as does his leader, the role of the resources sector in the long term in underpinning Australia’s economy and ensuring our export growth. The thing that disappoints me the most, though, is that after 19 minutes we are none the wiser as to what Labor in government will do for trade policy.

After three months in government, we have at long last an announcement today by the trade minister. Australian exporters of agricultural, industrial and service products, along with the coalition, have been waiting to see the detail of the trade minister’s review of export policies and programs—essentially what he terms his trade review. He banged on about this trade review in opposition, he banged on about it during the election campaign and yet today, instead of a bang, we have an announcement that can only be described as a dull thud.

Why are we not surprised? Since last year, the Minister for Trade has been talking down the performance of Australia’s exporters, warning of the need for a review to determine their future. That is what Labor and the Minister for Trade do best: talk down industries, talk down companies and talk down achievement, because that is what they know best, in the same way that the Treasurer and the Minister for Foreign Affairs talk down the investment opportunities in Australia when they are overseas. Far from the future direction that will provide impetus and leverage for Australian exporters and lead to more jobs for Australian working families, all we have from the trade minister and the government he represents is a back-to-the-future approach to trade policy that will only serve to create a sense of uncertainty amongst Australian exporters as to what they can expect next from this smoke and mirrors government.

Let us look more closely at exactly what the trade minister has announced today. Surprise, surprise! He has announced yet another review—not a plan for Australia’s exporters to harness, not a policy to enable Australian businesses to leverage global trade opportunities, but merely a review. It will be a review to consult and tell him the knowledge which he should have harnessed in his two years as shadow minister for trade. The truth is that the last couple of years were spent by the now trade minister taking his eyes off trade policy while he was all consumed in defending his own political survival and fighting tooth and nail for preselection. As a result, instead of a forward-looking agenda we have a backward-looking analysis.

The trade minister’s press release today says that the review will examine Australia’s trade performance over the past two decades for factors that affected export growth. This is all well and good for a historical wrap-up of Australia’s trade performance, but where does it leave exporters looking to navigate the exporting terrain of the future? The Labor Party and the trade minister should be looking forward to building exports for the coming two decades, not spending the next six months looking back at the past. Nostalgic navel gazing and historical revisionism, which they involve themselves in on virtually every issue, will not help Australian exporters.

The trade minister has played down, then up and then around the role of bilateral and multilateral agreements in Australia’s international trade relationships, taking one up at the expense of another, depending on the audience, on where he was at the time or on the mood he was in. It should be remembered that, while he has found new enthusiasm for Doha, the now Prime Minister in 2006 took a disturbingly defeatist attitude, proclaiming that the Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation talks was as dead as a dodo. How can Australians trust the Labor Party to successfully negotiate multilateral agreements, given that during their 13 years in government they could not even successfully complete a bilateral agreement? Nonetheless, today we see multilateral agreements are in favour, and with terms of reference indicating that the recommendations made must be mindful of the government’s support for the multilateral trade system.

So where does this leave Australia’s successful bilateral free trade agreements negotiated under the coalition government? Under our government, free trade agreements were successfully negotiated with Thailand, the United States and Singapore. Negotiations to include two of our biggest trading partners, China and Japan, were also begun. These agreements have already delivered real benefits to Australian exporters, opening up new markets and opportunities. FTAs offer the prospect of quicker and more extensive gains in our trading relationships with individual countries or groups of countries. The proliferation of FTAs around the world means that to secure and protect Australia’s competitiveness in our key export markets we need to negotiate FTAs as well. We must, in fact, continue those negotiations now—not after August; not after a six-month hiatus. At the same time, we need to remember that of the 151 members of the WTO only one, Mongolia, a country I visited as a minister, is not engaged in an FTA.

What the coalition asks today on behalf of Australian exporters is whether the trade minister can guarantee that the gains made under FTAs will not be thrown away. Can he guarantee that the hard fought gains in bilateral FTAs will not be chipped away and watered down to appease minority interests of left-wing cabinet colleagues or unions? We have already seen the trade minister cut down to size as the Minister for Finance and Deregulation’s razor gang slashed funding for negotiations on both the Australia-Japan and Australia-China free trade agreements. Furthermore, the trade minister presided over the axing, in his own department, of the senior agricultural negotiator position and replaced it with a much more junior position—just another sign that the trade minister and the Labor government are prepared to cut Australian farmers adrift. Labor has shown that it has very little understanding of the enormous value of bilateral arrangements and what they have brought to Australia, and it is continuing to gamble with the fortunes of local exporters.

Can I just correct the record and say that, contrary to the trade minister’s attempt to talk down our government’s trade performance, in the manufacturing sector under the Labor government only eight per cent of locally produced motor vehicles were exported, and yet under our government that figure jumped to 40 per cent.

At least one in five Australian jobs is now generated by exports. In regional and rural Australia, one in four jobs is now directly or indirectly linked to exports. Over the past decade, Australian export industries have created more than 400,000 jobs. Real wages have increased by 20 per cent and unemployment has fallen to a little over four per cent. Trade is clearly too important to our economy to become an ideological toy for the Labor Party, and now the Labor Party, in government, is forcing Australian traders and exporters to wait under a cloud of uncertainty as the Minister for Trade forces them to wait until the end of August so he can learn what he should have known after 11½ years in opposition.

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