Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Treasury) Share this | Hansard source

There's no doubt that trade benefits the Australian nation and improves living standards for our citizens. As an island nation, Australia is better off because of the trading relationship that we have with our neighbours and the world. It's produced higher living standards than most other countries throughout the world.

Labor has a very, very proud record of reform that's boosted trade and investment, and created jobs and increased the incomes of all Australians. Going back to the Whitlam government and that great legacy that they left, it was a beginning which opened up our economy in the wake of the sleepy years of previous Liberal administrations by reducing tariffs. There were massive reductions in tariffs that made our economy more competitive at that time. That was followed up by the legacy of the Hawke and Keating governments. Again, after very little reform in the Fraser years, the Hawke and Keating governments made a massive difference to the strength of the Australian economy, particularly through multilateral trade. We all know that they reduced tariffs; they opened up our economy to competition, particularly in service sectors; and they introduced Austrade. It was the Hawke government that established Austrade—that outreach for Australian businesses hoping to trade overseas. And they did this with cooperation from the union movement to ensure that the benefits of trade were shared equitably, that workers increased their skills and, importantly, that incomes of all Australians continued to grow during that period when we were liberalising our trading environment. Labor ensures that when we do these sorts of things the benefits of trade are shared equally amongst our citizens.

We all know that Australia has a massive opportunity in terms of the development that is occurring on our doorstep, within our vicinity, in Asia over the course of the next few years. It's forecast that Asia's middle class will triple to 1.7 billion people by 2020. As more people move into the middle class, they develop a thirst and a hunger for better services. They move away from traditional manufacturing based economies—based on lower wage levels and producing products that can undercut other competitors—and an agricultural society to a consumption based one where services begin to come to the fore. So products like agricultural products, aged and healthcare services, education and tourism services are going to boom in Asia over the course of the next few decades. Australia is uniquely positioned, with our proximity in Asia, to capitalise on the economic opportunity through trade that will come with our Asian neighbours. We can do this through increased investment in Asia and increased trade, and that will grow our economy and create jobs.

Other nations are aware of this and they're developing strategies to capitalise on this opportunity that is occurring in Asia, but, at the moment, Australia, as a nation, does not have an economic strategy to engage with Asia and to put ourselves in a position to capitalise on its growing middle class. That is why Labor has developed the future Asia strategy—to ensure that we capitalise on these economic opportunities within our region, to grow our economy and to increase living standards. We've announced some of the elements of that strategy around improving economic opportunities, including increasing Asian literacy on Australian boards and tapping into the great Asian diaspora that live in Australia. We've said that we'll implement the 10 key recommendations of the Varghese report into India that seems to have been left on the shelf by this government. We're looking at internships between Australian companies and Asian companies. All that revolves around improving economic opportunities and trading opportunities in the Asian century.

We'll do this by making sure that all Australians benefit. We won't sign agreements that have ISDS clauses in them, because we know that they disadvantage Australia. We won't waive labour market testing for contractual service providers, because we know that those sorts of clauses disadvantage Australians. We'll establish an Australian skills authority—an independent labour market testing body to determine genuine skills needs and to restrict temporary work visas so that they're only available where there is a genuine skills gap. We'll introduce more transparency and accountability around our trade agreements through the JSCOT process and an independent national assessment to ensure that any trade agreement that Australia signs up to is beneficial to Australians and benefits all Australians in our economy. I urge all our members to support the bill that's been introduced by the shadow minister for trade.

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