Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Moore for his question and acknowledge his deep commitment to economic growth and free trade. The China-Australia Free Trade Agreement is good news for jobs, good news for growth and good news for the Australian economy. It links us, a nation of 23 million people, to an economy of 1.2 billion people with all the opportunities that that entails, particularly in services—which is 70 per cent of our economy today but just 17 per cent of our exports. The big winner will be financial services, where our expertise in insurance, banking and funds management will all benefit through the liberalisation of the rules under ChAFTA.

I am asked: are there any risks to this approach? The greatest risk comes from those opposite, particularly from the Leader of the Opposition. We heard yesterday that when he was the national secretary of the Australian Workers Union, in 2005—three months before negotiations on ChAFTA had even begun—he was railing against the agreement. But it gets better. He did this interview with Meet the Press on 5 June 2005—four weeks after negotiations began. He said: 'One hundred per cent scepticism is the way to approach this free trade agreement.' But he did not even know what was in it. Then he went on to say it was a 'rushed China free trade agreement'. That was four weeks into negotiations, which have taken a decade to conclude.

The piece de resistance and the reason the Leader of the Opposition is not fit to govern this country is the following statement. In this 2005 interview, he said: 'What is it that we are going to sell China in the future that we are not selling them now?' Prime Minister, you know that in 2005 we had $42 billion worth of trade to China. Today, it is $150 billion. That is nearly four times more. That is because the Leader of the Opposition forgot to take his own advice when he said: 'The future is the present.'

The Leader of the Opposition was doing the bidding of the union movement when he was national secretary of the AWU. He is doing the bidding of the union movement a decade later. But he forgets he is the leader of a political party and his responsibility is to act in the national interest. And the national interest means that the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement becomes law.

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