John Forrest (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

This matter of public importance has been raised in order to focus on the need to create certainty for Australian exporters, which is where the Minister for Trade finished off in his discussion about investment and capital flows. Taking risks in the ruthless export arena requires considerable courage by exporters and a long-term strategy. Often forward investment is actually years ahead of the final outcome and exporters need the confidence that they have a government that is thinking strategically in the long term of their interests.

The minister’s cynical contribution about the need for this MPI is very unfair to exporters. I would remind the minister that it was his Prime Minister in opposition who said Doha was as dead as a dodo. I have never believed that, like the exporting horticulturalists that I represent. We must ultimately get an outcome. No-one has underestimated the difficulty of doing that, particularly in a US election year, with the need to get the US and the EU over the line in respect of those distorting subsidies they have, for agriculture in particular.

Exporters need to believe there is a long-term commitment to decision making that will support them in the future. From my discussion with exporters, I know they are not confident that they are getting that from this government. Let’s start with the May budget, which saw the slashing of $100 million from DFAT in the resourcing of trade negotiators. This has resulted in the axing of important negotiator posts. There are probably about 100 positions so affected, which will in particular be a setback for important negotiations on proposed FTAs with China and Japan.

Then there has been the deliberate policy decision by the new government to merge the functions of Invest Australia into Austrade, presumably because the minister failed against the razor gangs. This is because of short-sighted budget considerations rather than strategic ones. The end result of this will be to put back progress in establishing strong networks for export investment and to force such progress as could have been achieved back to the slow snail’s pace we see in the diplomatic sector, rather than having a commercial focus. Exporters need an entity which has a commercial focus rather than a bureaucratic one. This decision is typical of the Australian Labor Party, who are not able to think in a commercial sense because they do not have a background in it.

Then there was the failure of the Minister for Trade, the member for Hotham, to stand up to that razor gang in those important budget funding considerations. Exporters out there see all this. Their confidence is faltering, and that will have long-term implications for our export effort. We have heard the minister boast lyrically—and he has done it again today—about the one-off allocation of $50 million for EMDG in the 2009-10 year. On behalf of exporters, thank you for that. Presumably this whole boast is to distract from his long-term failure to provide that certainty that exporters need. He fails to explain that this one-off increase in EMDG applies only to expenses incurred in the 2008-09 financial year. It begs the question about the expenses incurred this financial year. The member for Groom has pointed out the implications of that. That needed a reaction as this program continued to grow.

The government has failed to deliver long-term certainty. There are no forward estimates in the budget for 2010-11 or 2011-12, so where is the opportunity for exporters to have some certainty that they will get some help with the important investments they have to make? Hopefully, when this report from Mortimer is tabled—I hope it is soon, Minister—we will get some indication of the advice the government is receiving.

In addition to all this, the government has told India we do not trust them with the use of our uranium for power generation, despite an agreement on that matter being well progressed. As well as further reducing Australia’s capacity to enhance its trade position in a significant commodity, it also reduces India’s capacity to contribute to its emission reductions in the global interest. To digress slightly, it is worth noting that this initiative—this one deal—on its own would satisfy Australia’s entire carbon emission abatement requirement in a global context. The government has truncated that opportunity.

To go back to the issue of trade certainty: of alarming proportions has been the swaying reed-in-the-wind position that the minister has had on the primacy of pursuing multilateral, as opposed to bilateral, approaches to trade. In the early part of his management of this portfolio, we heard a lot about multilaterals being the be-all and end-all, which we were not surprised at because we know about the Australian Labor Party’s philosophy on that matter. They argue that that is in the best interests of everybody, particularly poorer countries, but with no progress multilaterals are worth nothing to exporters. That brings me to the point that the coalition government adopted of not giving up on Doha, as the minister alleged, but recognising the difficulties and, in the interests particularly of agriculturalists and horticulturalists, which I represent, creating an opportunity for progress on their behalf, continuing to work in the global arena to get an outcome and removing those unfair export distortion subsidies by the EU and the US in particular.

Australian agriculturalists are absolutely impatient for that elusive breakthrough, but it has been pretty hard to get a bead on the minister on this issue. To listen to him wax lyrically about the free trade agreement with Chile—which, as a government member, I took a very specific interest in because it involved trading in seasonal fresh fruit and involved an enormous amount of work which could not be negotiated in the short space of nine months—the way he took credit, and the way he boasted about the progress the government has achieved and their new recognition of the need for bilaterals, beggars belief.

The minister made much of the fact that the previous government had not made progress on this matter. There were trade agreements with the US, Thailand, Singapore and—almost—Chile. Prior to that, the coalition government delivered on the deal that the government from before 1996 had with New Zealand. We delivered on that and did not complain about it. I must check the record—we probably gave the Keating government some recognition for the work they did on the trans-Tasman arrangements. The previous government had long-term negotiations with China, Japan, Malaysia—Malaysia alone is worth $1.9 billion to this country—and the Gulf states in the Gulf Cooperation Council, which are a very important market opportunity for Australian-built motor vehicles.

It is interesting that, of all the 151 countries of the WTO—which has been growing dramatically, particularly in the last decade—the only country not negotiating FTAs is Mongolia. Everybody else has recognised the need to make those bilateral arrangements. A lot of them wait impatiently for progress, particularly through Doha. I complete my contribution by reminding the minister of the absolute need for certainty for investors. These are long-term capital flows that they have to plan for. If they falter because the government is in itself faltering and not progressing matters, then I think the long-term implications for Australian exporters will be dire and will have a negative impact on our overall effort to improve our trade performance, particularly in exports. Let us see what Mortimer has to say, Minister. Get it out in the public arena as quick as you can; but, more important than that, show some progress on whatever Professor Mortimer recommends.

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