Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

I will go on record as saying the coalition government, when in government, loved the PALM scheme, Minister. We're very supportive of the PALM scheme, and in fact we're very disappointed by the fact that you're going to put more restrictions on it.

Deputy Speaker Wilkie, I will start by saying—you've been in this place longer than I have—what a joke this process by the Labor government is. Consideration in detail, when we were in government, was a very robust process. We would have ministers here and ministers there. The fact that the minister who is representing the Minister for Trade and, I assume, the Minister for Foreign Affairs made a five-minute presentation and left was a joke, Deputy Speaker Wilkie. I know that you would have witnessed many more robust discussions than this. So they're not interested in this process, and it just shows the lack of due process. They're not into democracy, really.

Let me start on the trade figures. One of the great achievements of the coalition government when in government from 2013 to 2022—and you would have observed this, Deputy Speaker Wilkie—were the free trade agreements that we did. There were quite a number of both bilaterals and multilaterals, to the extent that goods and services covered by trade agreements when we came into government were at about 25 per cent and, by the time we left, were at 80 per cent. That was because of the number of free trade agreements that we had done during that time, both multilateral and bilateral.

With those free trade agreements, we're selling, I would say, over $650 billion a year of goods and services to other countries, and a lot of that is on the back and on the basis of the free trade agreements that we did. They are funding our export industries. The four biggest are coal, gas, iron ore and farming. That side doesn't like a lot of those things, but they're funding our life right now. The government services they're paying for are enormous and very important to our economy and our country's welfare.

I have a question about an important part of those for the minister who's not here—a question for the minister who has disappeared, but anyway. As we know, the issue with the Labor Party, which has always been an issue for the Labor Party, is that they only have one stakeholder. We, as a government, had a lot of stakeholders. They only have one stakeholder, and that's the union movement. The union movement have told them, because they're operated by the union movement—they're puppets of the union movement, whichever union they've come from—that they cannot do a free trade agreement with an ISDS provision in it. That's the investor-state dispute settlement process.

Let me just remind those opposite of the free trade agreements that have got you in and wouldn't have been done if you were in government. You wouldn't have been able to do them because you wouldn't have been able to—

See this speech in context