John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

As the member for Gippsland has just said; yes, the reports from Asia were very encouraging, and the member for Braddon can take great credit for the role he fulfilled.

I thank my colleague the member for Gippsland and his lovely wife, Julie; the member for Cowper; and the member for Swan and his new bride. They added great value to the delegation and we could not have done without them. I record my sincere appreciation for the invaluable and lasting support that we were given by Mr James Rees. He gave tremendous support to me personally and to all members of the delegation. James Rees: you do great credit to the staff of the House of Representatives and I thank you for all your great work. I also thank the two ambassadors and the high commissioner who looked after us together with the staff in Hanoi, Bangkok and Singapore.

It is noteworthy that the two-way trade between Vietnam and Australia is in the order of about $6 billion, and it was even higher before the global financial crisis. I will not go over what the member for Gippsland said but Vietnam is certainly a country which is terribly important to the future of Australia, and vice versa. Although commodities have been of longstanding importance in our two-way trade there is a lot of encouragement in the expansion of our services sector, principally in the area of education. Other areas, such as agriculture, energy, electricity, oil and gas are sectors for growth and development in our two-way trade.

Thailand and Australia have had a free trade agreement since 2005 and the two-way trade between Australia and Thailand is over $16 billion. That is a lot of money. As the member for Gippsland said, when we arrived in Thailand we were concerned about whether that part of the delegation could proceed due to the devastating floods that the Thai people had experienced, but to their great credit they managed their water very well and managed to avert a terrible disaster. Coming out of those discussions were opportunities for us, as the Thais are having to deal with problems of salinity. The report goes into some detail about those opportunities, so I will not go over that, but Australia can help Thailand with salinity problems.

Like Vietnam, education is an important sector and a source of export revenue for our country. There are many young Thais studying in Australia. It was very surprising to learn that, conversely, there are almost no Australians studying in Thailand. That is something that ought to be remedied. There are great opportunities for two-way trade between our countries, Thailand and Australia. Another area is sugar, which should be explored because Thailand and Australia are the third- and fourth-largest sugar exporters in the world respectively.

The member for Gippsland referred to our visit to Hellfire Pass. That was a very, very moving experience, as he said. I worked for many years in the Department of Veterans' Affairs before I came here. I know Tom Uren, a former Deputy Prime Minister of our country, who was on the Burma-Thailand railway. I knew many of his colleagues who experienced the privations and hardships as POWs in that terrible part of the war and about their experiences. To go there and see what they experienced all those years ago is something I will not forget. We also visited Kanchanaburi War Cemetery and saw the graves of the young men who perished on the Burma-Thailand railway or as POWs. That was a terribly moving experience. We laid a wreath there and had a memorial service to honour the soldiers who lost their lives. We paid particular tribute to Weary Dunlop who is a legend in that part of the campaign.

Finally, we went to Singapore. We have a free-trade agreement with Singapore which has been in existence since 2003. Clearly the two-way trade relationship with Singapore is going from strength to strength. It is noteworthy that Australia has invested something like $25 billion in Singapore, and we are about the fifth-largest foreign investor there. One thing that came up while we were in Singapore is that they are very sensitive about defence cooperation. It is good to see Australia being so closely involved with Singaporeans in maintaining very close defence contact, because the stability of that region—as Singaporeans know only too well from what happened in World War II—is vital to them and to us.

Water management and water security are also important, because we come from a country which experiences droughts. We have had our own problems, and it was only a matter of about four years ago that everyone in Australia was worried that we were running out of water. Now we have had an abundance of rain and seem to have an abundance of water, but that will change. Singapore forever and a day has relied on imported water, so there are great opportunities for us to cooperate on water security and water management.

I conclude by saying it was a very, very successful delegation. Again I thank our hosts for the opportunity to visit their countries and bring our countries closer together. ASEAN is very important to the future of Australia, and the countries we visited are important to us and we are important to them. I encourage anyone who gets the opportunity to visit Vietnam, Thailand and Singapore to do so, because they are great friends of Australia and can contribute greatly to the growth of our country.

Debate adjourned.

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