Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to speak on the Export Market Development Grants Amendment Bill 2013 and also to support the amendments moved by the deputy leader and member for Curtin. Just by way of background, the export market development grants scheme is administered by Austrade and it partly supports export promotion expenses of eligible enterprises in order to boost the exports of Australian produced goods and services. It is a scheme that reimburses up to 50 per cent of eligible export promotion expenditure incurred by small- and medium-sized enterprises. Claims are reimbursed retrospectively for expenditure incurred in the previous financial years, pro rata, up to the cap. Around 5,100 firms applied for grants.

The basic provisions of this bill—and what it actually does—exclude expenses of export promotion for grant years six, seven and eight for the major markets of the USA, Canada and the European Union. It makes a tokenistic adjustment by increasing the number of grants by one year—just one year against eight—to countries of East Asia. First and foremost, this bill is simply confirmation of yet another broken promise by this Labor government. We can add this one to the long, long list of broken promises by this government. It is just another reason why the public no longer believes a word that they say and why the public has lost complete trust in anything that comes out of the mouth of any member of this government.

We will go back to 2007: this Labor government, then in opposition, promised hand on heart that they would increase—that is right: increase—funding for the export market development scheme. They told us how they understood this scheme, how it was vital for small business and how they were really going out there to help small business with their exports. In the last year of the Howard government, 2006-07, the export market development scheme was funded to the tune of $154.4 million—it was $154.4 million back in 2006-07. Come to this financial year, and we have a government that told us they would increase funding. They have not only been too lousy to maintain real expenditure, they have actually slashed the expenditure by $25 million. So this financial year, the expenditure is down to just $125 million.

This is the lowest amount of expenditure under this scheme for over two decades. It simply shows that Labor cannot be trusted with their promises, but not only that: whatever they promise, we see them doing the exact opposite. We saw them promise, 'No carbon tax.' We not only ended up with a carbon tax, but we ended up with the largest carbon tax in the world. They promised to stop the boats and we have ended up with an absolute explosion of boat arrivals. They promised to return the budget to surplus, but we just get larger and larger deficits. Here we had them promising to increase expenditure for the export market developments and what do we see? It is being slashed—slashed to the lowest levels in decades.

It is not only that, it is the hypocrisy that we have had from this government. On this bill, we have had one measly speaker from the government. I see the member for McEwan over there. Perhaps he is going to stand up and make a contribution to this bill.

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