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

No-one would ever suggest that the trade minister should not travel overseas. In fact I believe that the trade minister should travel—and he does travel very regularly, and I commend him for that. But it is about the number of people they take to these summits and whatnot when they go overseas, on the basis that simply by taking numbers they think they will get outcomes. We saw that the Minister for Trade was also in the huge entourage that went to Bali for the signing of the Kyoto agreement and all of that, but what has actually happened as a result of that in terms of lowering greenhouse gas emissions in Australia or perhaps even in the world? The answer is nothing. Again, I hold the hope that, having taken this large entourage to New Zealand and hearing that the minister is so absolutely committed to getting an outcome in terms of better relationships between New Zealand and Australia, he can actually do it and he does not rely, as this government does so regularly, just on spin.

When the Minister for Trade says he is committed to a bilateral relationship, of course that is just another round of rhetoric following on from whatever rhetoric it was last week on whether he was absolutely committed to multilateral international trade reform under Doha or whether this week’s flavour of the month is bilateral trade reform. Of course that message changes, depending on the audience and depending on where he may be at the time.

I mentioned earlier that this government’s only contribution to FTAs in the past has been to criticise them, if it suits that week, or to applaud them—for instance, when the Chile FTA was concluded and when, again, this government had very little, if anything, to do with the successful conclusion. It was only too happy to jump on the bandwagon. The fact of the matter is that Labor has never negotiated a free trade agreement in its entirety with any nation, and we have to wonder how confident we can be that this government will not—

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