Rick Wilson (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak and give my strong support for the Customs Amendment (Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement Implementation) Bill 2021. RCEP was signed by Senator the Hon. Simon Birmingham, the then Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment, and his counterparts from 14 countries on 15 November 2020. The other RCEP signatories are Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, China, Japan, New Zealand and the Republic of Korea. While Australia already has free trade agreements with the 14 RCEP parties there are still significant trade benefits that will accrue to Australian importers and exporters.

These benefits include access to a new single set of rules and procedures for accessing preferential tariffs in any of the 15 RCEP markets. It will reduce the compliance burden on Australian importers and exporters by allowing them to use a declaration of origin, a simpler process compared with the certificate of origin process currently in place. It will improve mechanisms for tackling non-tariff barriers including in areas such as custom procedures, quarantine and technical standards. More broadly the RCEP agreement will also offer greater certainty for business investment and rules of ecommerce, make it easier for Australian businesses trading online and provide a common set of rules on intellectual property. It also reinforces Australia's commitment to a rules-based trading framework.

When member for Barker spoke previously he paid due homage to the great Bert Kelly, former member of this place, who argued for free trade long before it was fashionable. I think we could probably assume that I wasn't around in that period from 1958 until the seventies when Bert Kelly was a member of parliament, but I can assume that back in the day the senior bureaucrats in this country, business leaders and almost all members of the public would have disagreed with his position on free trade—removing protections—leading to greater economic efficiencies and how it would massively benefit our country.

It's interesting that in the debate that we are having the moment there is this overwhelming, I guess, opinion from those same bureaucrats, business leaders and probably many members of the public around some of the climate policies that are being discussed. But to go back to the former member for Wakefield Bert Kelly, a nice little corollary for me is that his son Tony Kelly lives in my electorate in the little town of Porongurup. He and his wife Dawn are very dear friends, as are his extended family.

As someone who came to this place as an avowed free marketer, and I'd spent many years of my life campaigning for the deregulation of the Australian Wheat Board, I was very proud to be part of the coalition that signed, in the early days, free trade agreements with China, Japan and South Korea. The benefits of those free trade agreements have been manifested across my electorate, particularly amongst the agricultural sector. Access to broader markets—and a whole range of factors—has been a key part of seeing, for example, canola prices across the Western Australian wheat belt currently nudging $1,000 a tonne. Back in the day when I was farming, pre 2013, the price ranged from around $300 to $500 a tonne. The prices that we are seeing today make farming across the Wheatbelt of Western Australia an extremely profitable business. We have seen farmers investing very heavily in their businesses. We've seen the purchases of new machinery and of other inputs into the agricultural supply chain going through the roof. These are very prosperous times for wheat growers.

Similarly, meat producers—both sheep and beef—are also experiencing fantastically high prices and consistently high prices, too. We have seen prices for lamb at around $8 per kilo, and those prices have been maintained for several years. Previously, we had seen prices spike when there was, for instance, a drought on the east coast and, once the east coast got back to normal production, the prices would fall again. That hasn't been the case this time around. I put that down, in a very large part, to those free trade agreements that we have signed in the last seven or eight years. As I say, my electorate is very much seeing the benefits of those previously assigned free trade agreements.

Australia is an export nation. We have a small domestic population of around 25 million people and, of course, we need to trade with the rest of the world. Trade is a two-way thing. While we export the things that we do best, particularly in mining and agriculture but also some specialised manufacturing and our service industries, we also import from the world. People lose sight of the fact that that also benefits our nation. While I think many of us would lament the fact that the car industry has moved offshore from Australia, the fact is that we are now importing vehicles at the most economically efficient cost from countries in South-East Asia, including countries such as Japan, Korea and increasingly Thailand, and that has a benefit for local consumers. Why should local consumers be forced to pay a high price for a vehicle to protect an Australian industry that is not as efficient as its overseas counterparts? That is a particularly salient point that people need to remember about free trade agreements. It's not just about our exports and exporting the things that we do well; it's also about importing goods and services from countries who do it better than us—and we are winning that particular contest.

When I was growing up, and probably in the times of the great Bert Kelly, Australia ran a trade deficit every month. Every month, we'd be regaled with what the trade deficit was in a particular month and it caused economists and, I'm sure, Treasury bureaucrats enormous angst over how this nation was going to pay its way, because we consistently ran trade deficits. I checked the trade figures for the month of June, July and August of this year and I can report that our nation's trade surplus in June was $11.7 billion; in July it was $12.65 billion; and in August it was $15 billion. What that tells me is that Australia is doing pretty well when exposed to the competition from the rest of the world. We are producing goods and services that people in the rest of the world want and we are importing those goods and services that Australian people need and want, and we are currently coming out in front. I think that is a great result and a great testimony to the vision and foresight of the aforementioned Bert Kelly.

To come back to the RCEP agreement, what it does is expose us to the Asian middle class. Thirty per cent of the world's population live directly to the north of us, sharing a similar time zone. This has certainly come at a time when we need to diversify our trade. In the early 1970s our trade partner and significant economic partner through that period, the United Kingdom, joined the Common Market, and Australia lost one of its largest trading partners. That took some adjustment, and we turned towards Asia at that time. Recently, China has become our largest trading partner by a considerable margin. Through various geopolitical issues, our reliance on that market has become problematic, so it's particularly important and particularly timely that this agreement allows us access to broader markets.

We have much work still to do. To Trade Minister Tehan: congratulations on revisiting the UK and the trade agreement that was recently agreed to—it's not in place yet—and for the work that has been done with the United Kingdom to reopen that market. The EU is also looking to expand its trade opportunities, and certainly Australia is well placed to supply goods, services and particularly agricultural produce to the European Union. That, of course, would massively benefit my constituents. There are a couple of additional areas of opportunity, as I see them, and the first one is India. With its 1.2 billion people, a population which is rapidly becoming more wealthy, the Indian market is particularly crucial. Once again, it's particularly important for us to get our agricultural produce and food into that market, and I'm looking forward to work being done on that. The Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf are not often mentioned, but we also currently export a great deal of agricultural produce into those markets, and any freeing up of not so much tariffs but certainly trade barriers would be much appreciated.

I want to touch briefly on the importance of a rules based system. The barley growers in my electorate had a rude wake-up call and discovered that not everybody plays by rules when, in the middle of 2018, China initiated an antidumping process against the barley growers from Western Australia. An antidumping claim is that subsidised products are being sold under the cost price into a given market. As a barley grower from Western Australia, I can reassure this House and anybody listening or watching that there are no subsidies on Western Australian barley. What we saw as part of this process was that barley marketers and exporters out of Western Australia had to open their books to the purchasers. When I say 'open their books', they had to show their Chinese customers every sale that they had conducted, not just with China but with other markets across the world, to show that they were not undercutting or selling a dumped product or a subsidised product into China. That's not a bad position of strength to be in as a purchaser, when you've been able to have a look at your supplier's books and see exactly what they are selling into other markets for. I suspected at the time—and I'm sure this will be borne out in the World Trade Organization, where we currently have an appeal underway—that this was a spurious claim and that it was simply used to leverage information out of the barley producers from Western Australia.

Finally, I encourage businesses across my electorate to take the opportunity to sell into these markets, new and old. Austrade does have small grants available for businesses to get overseas, to get into these markets, to talk to customers and see if we can provide them with the services and goods that they need. We have trade missions in many of these countries, and there is support from the Australian government for exporters to get overseas, expand our markets and create ongoing Australian jobs and wealth.

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