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

Ten months after the federal election was concluded the people of Australia have found, in the most crushing of ways, that the Rudd Labor government they were promised prior to last year’s election is not the Rudd Labor government that has been delivered. Despite its grand promises this government has been a comprehensive failure—a dud. It has failed to deliver across all facets of the economy: on health, on education, on roads, on infrastructure, on petrol prices, on grocery prices and on the cost of living. Another of the most striking elements of the way this government has let down people in Australia is its comprehensive and continuing failure on trade policy. Almost a year after the election of the government, trade policy remains mired in hypocrisy and confusion. The only constant that exporters and investors have is the repeated evidence that the government is out of its depth. The government’s confusion on trade reaches into the very heart of its policy and has cast a net of confusion right across the Australian exporting community. I use the term ‘trade policy’ very loosely, as it has been more a haphazard collection of passing thoughts and ideological biases that are repeatedly undermining the opportunities of Australian exporters and investors.

The Rudd government came into office with a lengthy history of deriding the value of bilateral free trade agreements. In a series of statements the Minister for Trade has repeatedly made it clear that, as far as he is concerned, bilateral free trade agreements are poor second cousins to multilateral regional arrangements. These were the trade minister’s own words and, true to those words, the trade minister has spent most of his time in office talking down bilateral agreements and, in the process, undermining Australian jobs and opportunities. This has been despite the clear evidence of the success of the coalition government’s negotiated FTAs with the United States, Singapore and Thailand. Instead, the Rudd government has taken a one-eyed approach and focused all its attention on the Doha Round of free trade talks at the expense of alternatives.

While the previous government was a strong supporter of Doha, we believed that it was essential to have a balanced and wide-ranging trade policy incorporating both bilateral and multilateral agreements. That is clearly not a view that this government subscribes to. Along with the minister’s own words we have the evidence from DFAT officials, who conceded during Senate estimates that they had not been instructed to work on a backup plan should the Doha talks break down. This is, of course, despite the Prime Minister’s infamous statement, when he was the shadow minister for foreign affairs and trade, that Doha was as dead as a dodo.

In the chopping and changing of words and policies, exporters and investors have seemingly become an afterthought for this government. Now, in the post-Doha fallout, the Rudd government has been sent scrambling for an alternative policy, because the collapse of the Doha Round of world trade talks has exposed the weakness of the Rudd government’s chaotic approach to trade. After promising the world, this government has delivered nothing. Near enough is nowhere good enough for the exporting businesses across Australia who have been subject to a haphazard, politically motivated trade policy from this government. Exporters are now paying the price for a policy based on Labor Party ideology rather than a practical understanding of the reality of world trade and the need for a commercial understanding of how exporters operate.

But, lo and behold, the Rudd government now claims it has become a fully-fledged supporter of bilateral free-trade agreements. But they are empty words, and an eleventh hour conversion is a poor substitute for a substantive policy. The Rudd government’s change of heart does nothing to make up for the nine months of lost opportunities for exporters that were a direct result of the government’s myopic approach on trade that has marginalised bilateral free trade agreements. It will take more than just riding on the coattails of the hard work completed by the previous coalition government to deliver for Australian exporters. Labor must end the policy chaos and replace its narrow trade policy with a comprehensive approach that delivers for all of Australia’s exporters.

While the trade minister may stand up and expect us to believe that he is a forthright advocate of bilateral free-trade agreements as a way to enhance the opportunities for Australia’s exporters, the evidence sends another message. To date, the only commitment this government has made to FTAs was to ensure they were included in the work of the Labor Party’s razor gang as it went about cutting expenditure in key areas. What we have seen as a result of that is the cutting of the negotiation budgets for the FTAs with China and Japan, our two largest trading partners. This government must explain how the best interests of Australian exporters are being served by slashing budgets at a crucial time in negotiations, because, while the government might be interested in face-saving measures, Australian exporters and investors are still being denied the certainty they require.

I now move to the EMDGS, the Export Market Development Grants Scheme. The failings of this government on bilateral and multilateral trade negotiations have been grave, but unfortunately they are not the only occasion on which Australian exporters have felt the sharp edge of the Rudd government’s inability to articulate a coherent and effective trade policy. This government has also chosen to play politics with the future of Australian exporters by refusing to address the funding shortfall in the EMDG Scheme, a most important and successful program that has provided a valuable incentive for Australia’s exporters to extend their reach into new markets.

Labor acknowledged the popularity of the EMDG Scheme under the coalition government but, despite its promises, despite its musing, despite the illusion that it created that it would fund extra money into the EMDG Scheme, it has refused to allocate funding to a sufficient level in 2007-08, 2008-09, 2010-11 and 2011-12. This has left Australian exporters, who went about their business in good faith, tens of thousands of dollars short. We have already seen the first payments under the current payment year cut from $70,000 to $40,000, and the trade minister knew of the potential shortfalls in the EMDG Scheme for more than six months. Rather than standing up for exporters, he allowed himself to get rolled by the razor gang and have no extra money for this current year. He prefers instead to pass the buck, to involve himself in the blame game and to fail to acknowledge that he is actually in government now and that he can actually address this. It is the usual all talk and no action; it is the usual change from brainstorming to ‘blame-storming’, where those opposite who are in a position to change what is happening sit there and blame those who have gone before them. They are the ones—the Labor Party—who are in a position to provide the funding that is so required for the EMDG Scheme.

The Rudd Labor government has played a cruel hoax on Australia’s exporters by claiming to extend the EMDG Scheme, by broadening the parameters and by making the scheme wider while at the same time not addressing the shortfalls in three of the four forward years. Labor’s one-off allocation of $50 million for grants in 2009-10, which will relate to expenses incurred by exporting businesses in 2008-09, is leaving exporters out in the cold. Of greater concern is Labor’s attempted deception of exporters by failing to allocate extra money for the scheme after this initial $50 million in next year’s funding. Having expanded the expectations, expanded the guidelines and put in what it knows it has to put in every year but only for one year, it then falls back to no extra allocations, as I said, in 2010-11 or 2011-12. This failure is on top of the cuts from merging the functions of Invest Australia into Austrade. Those cuts are significant, and those functions are both essential parts to support the infrastructure for Australian exporters.

It is not just in the area of policy and it is not just in the area of funding export market development grants where this government is falling down; it is with regard to our trade relationships with important and key developing trade partners. In recent days we have seen the Rudd government bogged down again, displaying the greatest degree of breathtaking hypocrisy on trade with its refusal to sell uranium to India. This untenable position has seen the government support a decision by the Nuclear Suppliers Group to overturn the longstanding ban on nuclear trade with India and then, in the next breath, not sell the Indians the uranium they need—under the strictest export standards in the world that Australia can enforce and inspected by the IAEA.

This double standard is undermining Australia’s relationship with India and undermining the position of Australian exporters and investors. It is also thwarting the opportunities to supply the thriving global market for uranium and at the same time compromising our entire trade relationship with India. India is going to need clean energy not only to lift its standard of living but to meet the energy demands of a rapidly growing population. It needs energy to lift its standard of living without increasing global emissions to the point where the rest of the world is affected. There is no logic at all in the Labor Party sitting there and saying they want to lower greenhouse gas emissions and then failing to sell uranium to India on the same terms and conditions and under the IAEA inspection regime that they are prepared to sell uranium to China for. It is illogical. It is a refusal that shows up the hypocrisy and the ideology of those who sit opposite. It is small by comparison, though, to the ideology that drives a government like Anna Bligh’s that supports a uranium export program and does not allow the mining of that uranium in Queensland—the last bastion of substantial uranium deposits still stands. The Prime Minister stands here and claims to be a Queenslander and claims to be a friend of Anna Bligh’s, but he is yet to make any impact on that illogical ban.

The evidence is clear and the failure of this government to deliver a consistent trade policy across trade negotiations, EMDG and uranium exports has clearly shown it to be inept, and then exporters have to contend with the fact that it could all change again. If and when the trade minister finally decides to release the outcome of his trade review, exporters could find themselves with a whole new set of rules. We know that those on the other side are very good on reviews. They have about 160 of them; they have released but a few of them. But we need to see this particular review on trade to ensure we have the consistency that the minister for energy spoke about, the consistency that gives certainty to business to ensure they have the confidence to attack export markets, to grow jobs in Australia and to ensure Australians have confidence in their export future.

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