Warren Truss (Wide Bay, National Party, Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

This statement concerns a whole range of trade issues and I am happy to relate this to traders who would want to sell products to take advantage of the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement. There are many people working in those countries who are not going to get their current EMDGS claims paid, and there are going to be a lot more who are not going to get their claims paid in the period ahead. The government commissioned the Mortimer inquiry to look at these issues. The Mortimer report recommended unwinding most of the changes that the government made to the scheme.

Australian exporters are going to face increasing challenges in the ASEAN market, some of them as a result of this free trade agreement. They are going to need full cooperation, support and assistance from the government to not only take advantage of any new markets that might have been created but also protect the markets they have as a result of the increased competition in those markets that will be available under this FTA. So it is not good enough for the government now to be short-sheeting the funding for this program. You simply cannot make a lot more people eligible and then offer less money and expect it to go around. We funded it 100 per cent in each of these years and we would have funded it again in the year that you have short-funded it and left people short. You look at our record. We funded it. They did not go without when we were in government.

I know this is not the minister’s fault. I am not blaming the minister for this. He went to cabinet to get some money for it and they knocked him back. Unfortunately, when they knocked him back, the exporters whom we need to work hard and take advantage of trading opportunities were left without funding under the EMDG Scheme. They are hurting and they feel deeply aggrieved because they were used to getting 100 per cent payments and this year they did not get 100 per cent payments because this government refused to provide the top-up funding necessary to make sure that the payments were in fact made. I think that that is a significant issue in trying to take advantage of the new free trade agreement which will come into effect on 1 January next year. We will need to be able to provide the kind of assistance and support that our exporters will need to open up these new markets. Many of them will have to put in a great amount of effort and time to establish the clients and to work through the issues. But it will be very difficult for them to do that if they are not going to get proper reimbursement of their expenses, as they have expected under the EMDG Scheme over many years.

This agreement also talks about new opportunities in Asia for the Australian meat industry. I welcome any new markets that might be possible. However, the chances of Australia opening up new markets for meat have also been dealt a savage blow by the government’s decision to axe the 40 per cent subsidy on export inspection charges. This will add 60 per cent to the cost of meat inspection services in Australian meatworks. It will add millions of dollars to their expenses, something like $40 million or $50 million. That is not the kind of encouragement that an industry would expect to receive if the government were really interested in opening up new trade opportunities. This subsidy has been in place for most of the last couple of decades. It was interrupted briefly by the previous Labor government, but it was reinstated in 2001 and has made a huge difference. No other country in the world expects their exporters to meet the full cost of export inspection services—the cost of a lot of the bureaucracy, the trade negotiations and all sorts of other things that will be added on.

Some of this is being hung on the Beale review, but it seems that only a small part of the Beale review is being adopted. The Beale review recommended significant changes to the way in which these charges are assessed and also that the government pick up the tab for the departmental expenses and a lot of the international negotiations. This government has decided to lump the full cost onto the industry, making exporting from Australia even harder.

We do need free trade agreements but we also need a government that is going to support our exporters to create jobs in Australia and not just see them transferred to other parts of the world. We are not the only people who can take advantage of this FTA; other exporters among the 12 partners can too. If we are going to be competitive in those markets then we will need to have a strong and effective Australian exporting sector that can count on the support of its government and not expect just to have more taxes, more difficult industrial relations and more penalties placed on its capacity to do its job.

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