Ms Julie Bishop (Curtin, Liberal Party, Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Durack for her question, for her electorate, like many in Western Australia, has a strong agriculture sector where produce is grown and exported to China. Western Australian agriculture businesses—indeed, exporters across the country—stand to gain enormously from the free trade agreement with China, for it will remove significant barriers to Australian agricultural exports across a range of products including dairy, beef, lamb, wine, horticulture, barley and seafood in particular.

The three agreements negotiated by this government with China, with Japan and with South Korea are an unprecedented investment in Australian jobs and in Australia's economic future. This trifecta covers an extraordinary 52 per cent of all of our exports, and the benefits are already flowing from the Japan and Korea agreements. Now our exporters and producers, from dairy farmers to pharmaceutical producers, are waiting on entry into force of the China agreement, when tariffs will be slashed on around 95 per cent of our exports into our biggest market.

But the biggest threat to the realisation of all these benefits is in fact the Leader of the Opposition. He has a history of saying one thing privately and another thing publicly. He double-deals on free trade agreements. And let me point this out: as a trade union boss, the Leader of the Opposition led the calls for Australia to deny China market economy status. That is an essential precondition for free trade agreement negotiations, and the trade union leader was leading the calls against China—

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