Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the motion and commend Dr Stone for bringing it to the House. I forget the name of her seat now.

An honourable member: Murray.

Murray. How can I forget Murray? Of course, it reminds me of my youth. I spent a bit of time on the Murray myself, on Nikalapko Station between Morgan and Waikerie every summer from about the age of 15 onwards, picking apricots and oranges when I could not avoid picking them—and peaches, which were not much fun. That particular station exported apricots to Singapore; it was back in the early 1990s and late 1980s. Of course, they got a much higher price for their exported fruit through quality and attention to detail, and as a result we got much better wages than you would picking oranges; in those days you were flat out getting about $30 a bin, as it were. So I think I have a fair understanding of the practical end of this industry, and it is obviously an industry which is suffering from the same challenges that are affecting all manufacturing industries—no less so the industry that dominates both Geelong and Elizabeth, and the deputy speaker would know very well about the pressures on Australian manufacturing.

These pressures are mainly due to our currency, and I think this is the great unheralded debate in Australia. We have been preoccupied by carbon prices and by the daily events of politics, and we are missing the two fundamental economic challenges that face our country. The first one is that we have had a prolonged high currency and, even though commodity prices have declined, our currency has remained higher than it otherwise should have because of the investments made by overseas investors and by central banks from around the world. Our currency has become something of a safeguard currency, which is a first in the history of our country. It tends to be a very highly traded currency and one that has followed commodity movements and acted as a shock absorber for our economy in bad times like the Asian crisis. Today, or at least in the last few years, it has acted in the opposite way. It is not a shock absorber at all; it is a shock contributor to manufacturing and it is the big issue, because of course we have other people lowering their currencies: the Japanese, the Europeans, the Chinese and the US. So it is no surprise to me that fruit growers and workers in these industries are suffering from that same fundamental economic challenge.

The other challenge is that, whereas once upon a time we lived in an age of easy money and easy credit, we now live in an age of very tight credit. It does not matter where you go in the country and what business you talk to: businesses when they talk to their banks face very, very stringent loan-to-valuation calculations and have had to make appropriate adjustments to that.

Those two big economic changes are not going to go away just because we are having a change of government. I hate to break it to members opposite, and I think they might regret some of their rhetoric in this chamber, because they think that a simple change of government will usher in this wave of nostalgia and the world will go back to the way it was pre global financial crisis and it will all be right. In actual fact, they will be dealing with the same challenges we deal with.

I think Dr Stone's motion—particularly in regard to the antidumping measure and the safeguard measures—does have a great deal of merit to it. I am on the record as calling for something similar for the car industry. I think we do have to think very carefully about the implications of our currency and the fact that the age of easy credit has gone, and nostalgia will not solve our problems; only discussion will.

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