Jason Wood (La Trobe, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Customs, Community Safety and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank all honourable members for their contribution to this debate on the Customs Amendment (Product Specific Rule Modernisation) Bill 2019. The bill will amend the Customs Act to simplify the way in which the product-specific rules of origin annexes in six of Australia's free trade agreements, the FTAs, are implemented domestically. The Customs Act will refer directly to the annexes, enabling future changes to the annexes to be reconsidered in the Customs Act. This will remove the need to prescribe the product-specific rules of origin in regulations to amend them when the annexes are updated.

The changes to the Customs Act proposed by the bill are technical in nature and do not change the benefits available under any of the FTAs. These amendments, however, will streamline the implementation of updates to the FTAs that relate to goods, help facilitate smoother trade between Australia and our FTA partners and reduce the administrative burden on importers. Further, it is expected that the size of the regulations for the six affected FTAs will significantly reduce over 3,000 pages to about 90 pages, lowering the cost administration of the FTAs and removing unnecessary red tape.

Regarding the opposition amendments, this bill has nothing to do with economic modelling, IA-CEPA or the other free trade agreements considered by this House on Monday. It is concerning that the shadow minister for trade and the shadow assistant minister for Treasury cannot work that out. All we ask the opposition to do is actually read the bill. This has nothing to do with that. I therefore commend this bill to the House.

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