James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the second reading of the Export Control Amendment (Streamlining Administrative Processes) Bill 2022. I start by making the point that I represent the electorate of Sturt, which is in the city of Adelaide. If you look at a map of my electorate, you wouldn't think that it was resplendent with agricultural businesses, but in fact, in the proud history of South Australia from European settlement, Adelaide has always been a city that has serviced the agricultural industries that surround it. That's always been the economic genesis of Adelaide as a metropolitan area, until the Playford era of the 1930s and beyond, when we happily diversified into industries, particularly the car industry and other manufacturing sectors. But it is still the case that the primary production industries of agriculture and mining are the two very significant elements of South Australia's economy, and metropolitan Adelaide therefore still is extremely reliant on jobs that come from the agricultural sector and, of course, exports more broadly.

I have some very significant exporting agricultural firms that are headquartered in my electorate of Sturt. Thomas Foods are a good example. They're rebuilding, as we speak, their significant abattoir that was destroyed by fire back in 2017, from memory. That is, of course, in the electorate of Barker, but their corporate functions are in my electorate of Sturt. My metropolitan electorate is also very proudly the home of the Magill estate, Penfolds' original vineyard and winery. Grange Cottage is on that site and, of course, lends its name to the very famous wine now called Grange—formerly Grange Hermitage—which is, I think, fairly uncontroversially considered the greatest wine produced at least in Australia—but, we might even claim, further afield still.

So export, particularly agricultural export, is very important to my electorate. I also spent almost 10 years in the wool industry working for a business called Michell, a very significant South Australian early-stage fibre-processing business for Australian wool. It was established in 1870 and is still owned by the Michell family—the sixth generation of the family involved in the business and the fifth generation owning and running the business. In my time there, the division that I ran was 100 per cent involved in export. Everything that we produced went overseas in some way, shape or form through the supply chain, so I had a lot of experience with the interesting challenges and idiosyncrasies of dealing with exporting to many, many different countries and the way in which rules and regulations can be complicated and can change depending on who you're dealing with and when.

This bill, as indicated in the second reading speech from the minister and also the contribution from our shadow minister, is being supported, I think, unanimously. I wasn't certain whether the member for Kennedy was speaking for or against the bill, but I feel like he's not going to divide on it, so I'm certain it's going to pass the Chamber and the parliament, and I look forward to that. From my electorate's point of view and from my experience in the wool industry, I'm very keen to see us do everything we can to support our export industries, particularly in the agricultural sector, and to have better flow of information between government departments where that can be improved compared to some of the restrictions that are in place right now. It's vitally important for our country. We've obviously had the ABS statistics—just in the last couple of days, I think—confirming another record monthly trade surplus: over $12 billion. I think last year in one of the months we hit $16 billion, which is absolutely phenomenal.

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