Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank to member for Fenner for his contribution and for reminding me of our rocks and crops. There's plenty of mining up in the Territory, and we want to do more and more agriculture, as you're well aware, Mr Deputy Speaker. We all know that it was on the proverbial sheep's back that Australia's wealth was made, as well as on the back-breaking work of the tough men and women who made that industry. But it was also on the back of cows and cattle farmers, agriculture, wine, wine growers, iron ore, coal and natural gas, the miners, the engineers, the truckies, LNG carrier workers, and the many more professionals that have made these industries so productive and enriching for Australia. That's only when we think of goods that are being dug up, farmed, cultivated and exported to the world, competing with economic giants half a nation away. We're often dominating markets by the quality of our goods and our professional people.

Thanks to Australia's economic opening—mainly by Labor governments, it must be said—this trade transformation contributed massively to the decades of uninterrupted growth that we've enjoyed. It was these macroeconomic settings put in place by visionary economic decision-making and nation building that allowed what became known as the terms of trade boom between roughly 2005 and 2011, on the back of those high commodity prices.

Another transformation in the Australian economy has been our transition to a very large services exporter, not least of which is our export of education and training in our university and TAFE systems. I reflect on conversations being had about this with experts around Monash University that'll be starting up in Indonesia in the near future. But thanks to this transformation and to the technological revolutions that have allowed it, many of our unis have managed to transition rapidly to online learning environments during the COVID-19 crisis to avoid the worst-case scenario. Of course, not all were so lucky, and the reliance of certain Group of Eight universities on international students has raised legitimate questions, I think, within the sector itself about the resilience against external shocks like we've seen with COVID-19.

Higher education is just another example of how important international trade has become to the Australian economy. The university sector supports about 240,000 Australian jobs, and a big whack of jobs in my electorate, in Darwin. It's actually now our fourth-largest export earner, and we're talking about around $40 billion a year. It's absolutely massive. At a time when our universities are in crisis, it has beggared belief that the Australian government has turned its back on the thousands of Australian jobs that are likely to be lost if this sector continues on the path that it's on. I'm sure honourable members are aware that university employees haven't been able to access JobKeeper, for example. We are talking about 21,000 jobs in the sector being cut if we keep on this track, and a $19 billion drop in overseas student revenue. That money the overseas students bring to Australia is spent on research in our universities and on teaching for all the students, including the Aussie students; not just those overseas students.

It is fair to say that international trade, in all its shapes and sizes, has made a large and even dominant contribution to Australian economic growth in past decades. This is thanks, as we have seen, to Australia's economic opening. Of course, this opening hasn't always been perfectly successful. We can, and should, regret that key manufacturing and industrial capabilities have been lost, often sacrificed by federal governments that tended to drink too much Kool Aid and believe economic globalisation had no costs or losers. I think it's fair to say that in the middle of the national COVID crisis we woke up to the painful reality, decades too late, that we had traded off key assets of our sovereignty and self-reliance in an unthinking search for economic efficiencies and a balanced budget.

There's been a lot of soul searching about how much self-sufficiency we want to have, how much heavy manufacturing we want to have here. We obviously need to be making our own PPE. We still want to attract foreign investment, tourists and students, which we need, but we shouldn't look at it only on our terms, because the result of that would be, predictably, disastrous. We can't have it our own way every day. Our economy benefits disproportionately from trading rules which we helped to build and whose observance continues to be in our national interest. As the member for Fenner said, we need to avoid the push to become more and more protectionist. We must find a balance, what's smart for our economy.

COVID-19 laid bare the excesses of Australia's deindustrialisation, which traded off self-reliance and resilience in vital sectors like fuel security, the production of pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and emergency stockpiling. The point about fuel security is an important one. We've had some positive discussions in recent times about the need to diversify our storage and, more importantly, to have our storage on Australian soil. Because of COVID-19, surely now we have a national consensus that these just-in-time supply lines, though they are incredibly efficient and do drive down prices—at Woolies, for example—come with built-in risks that we have to manage, not just worsen by shutting ourselves off from the world? A very much justified call for greater self-reliance can't give way to a populist attempt to shut us off from the currents of global economic growth and investment. That's what's protectionism would do. In short, we'd be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

This is the kind of trade-off that we'll need to manage intelligently in the coming months and years. Getting the dial right between the extremes of total reliance on the world and total self-reliance will be an ongoing national project. This project goes far beyond politics. It's important. It's not just about what we find in the IGA aisle but whether we want to be the sort of country that feeds the world but has no food security. Do we want to be a country that has a world-leading medical system but not enough face masks to protect us from deadly smoke, and sneezes and coughs? We don't want to be a country that fuels global economic growth but whose own tanks—fuel storage, as I said—are empty in peacetime. And it would be disastrous if they were empty in wartime. We don't want to be a country that educates South-East Asia's elites while our own literacy, numeracy, university rankings and Asia literacy slide.

As we balance diverse needs and make measured judgements on trade, trade itself can, and will, be our economic saviour. As the shadow trade minister, Madeleine King, has written:

There have always been good reasons for Australia to pursue sovereign industrial capabilities. Labor has long argued the case for lifting local manufacturing capacity that complements and builds on our comparative advantages.

Debate adjourned.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 16:28

See this speech in context