Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the Customs Tariff Amendment (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership Expansion) Bill 2024, and I thank the member for Page for his contribution and his commitment to this bill. As he said, we in regional Australia understand the importance of trade. It is such a key to our economy.

Not one hour ago, I was in my office making a contribution to a publication called the Locky News, which is a small community newspaper for a town called Lockington. In the contribution that I made, I spoke about Lockington, a town of 800 people in a small region and what impact it has around the world. It has a great dairy industry, and a lot of the milk that is produced in Lockington finds its way to Fonterra in Stanhope. Fonterra is Australia's largest producer of mozzarella cheese, and that gets exported all around the world. I said this to make sure the people of Lockington understand how important they are: there is a good chance that if you are having a pizza somewhere in South-East Asia that the mozzarella started life as milk produced in the Lockington region. Also it is a great producer of processing tomatoes that go to Kagome or over to Shepparton for SPC, so there is also a chance that, if someone is making the pasta sauce somewhere around the world, the tomatoes were grown in this rich agricultural area. Trade has facilitated that.

If you go a bit further east in my electorate, the Goulburn Valley that surrounds the city of Shepparton really is built on trade. Obviously people will know my passion for a company called SPC. Everyone in this place is welcome to go and get a snack pack of Australian peaches from my office. Not only do we grow the peaches and manufacture them in the Shepparton factory—long may that continue; there is new ownership of SPC that is doing some great things in that space—but a lot of that fruit gets sent overseas for people to enjoy. There is nothing like some clean, green Australian fruit on the table. Fresh fruit also gets exported. The apple industry has massively increased in the Shepparton and Goulburn Valley region as a result of being able to trade apples overseas. The dairy industry and the fruit industry in my part of the world indicate how important trade is.

The accession of the United Kingdom to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership—we call it the CPTPP—is something we're very pleased with. The United Kingdom are a great trading nation within a rules based multilateral trade system, and they possess a strong track record of compliance with trade commitments that all CPTPP members must have. The CPTPP, to recap, is a free trade agreement between Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam. The UK is the first member to be added to the agreement and the first European country to join.

Entry builds on that Australia-UK free trade agreement which entered into force on 31 May 2023. The free trade agreement between Australia and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland was the first to be negotiated post-Brexit. Australia and the UK have a long and fruitful relationship, and the FTA is an extension of the ties that bind our two nations. There's nothing like walking through a Sainsbury's or a Tesco or any of the other supermarkets in the UK and seeing Australian produce whether it be fresh fruit from my electorate, processed fruit from my electorate or cheese or infant formula products that have the Australian flag in those supermarkets. It's wonderful to see. It's good for us, it's good for our farmers and it's good for the people who we trade with because they are getting the benefit of our fantastic agricultural produce.

In trade terms overall, the UK impact assessment suggested the agreement could increase bilateral trade in the long run by 10.4 billion pounds—more than A$18 billion—assuming a 53 per cent increase in trade resulting from reductions in regulatory restrictions to goods and services, trade tariff reductions, income and supply chain effects and UK economic growth. Almost all the Australian goods exported, by value, now enter the UK without tariffs, and this agreement really does put the 'free' in free trade. This continues the coalition's really strong track record on free trade agreements. Of Australia's 16 free trade agreements, 13 of them entered into force under coalition governments. One in five Australian jobs is trade related. On average, businesses that export employ more staff, pay higher wages and achieve higher productivity compared to non-exporters, and nowhere is that more true than in the electorate of Nicholls.

I'd just like to give some credit to various areas. Firstly, I'll go back to the eighties and the Hawke-Keating government that focused on tariff reduction and opened up Australia to more trade. I think that was a good thing for Australia to do in the eighties. It was a business-friendly government, and I'd like to see this Labor government be a little bit more business friendly in its aspirations. Be that as it may, between 2013 and 2022, the Liberals and Nationals in government finalised 11 trade agreements, including the FTA with the UK and the economic cooperation and trade agreement with India. We raised the share of trade covered by FTAs from 27 per cent in 2013 to over 70 per cent, and we actively supported our exporters to diversify export markets and create jobs and economic activity in regional, rural and remote communities, and I'll say especially in that great food bowl, the Goulburn Valley, which is in the electorate of Nicholls.

I also want to give a lot of credit to some of the former trade ministers who were involved in those free trade agreements. I've seen that the member for Wannon has just walked in. I want to congratulate the member for Wannon for his fine efforts as trade minister in helping to negotiate a number of those free trade agreements. The people of Nicholls, whose economic future relies on our ability to trade, thank him for that. I also want to thank the former member for Goldstein Andrew Robb who was also a trade minister and very effective in the area of free trade agreements.

The upshot is that the coalition believes in free and fair trade, and it's got to be fair. Some of the trade around the world isn't, and that's why some of these free trade agreements are so important. The rules based multilateral trade system underpins the global economy, and it's critical to regional economies, including the people I represent. The CPTPP membership will enhance the United Kingdom's engagement in the Indo-Pacific in support of shared prosperity, security and regional stability. This is critically important. We want people in the Indo-Pacific to be trading with us because if we're having trade relationships, we can have other relationships. We can have defence relationships. We can have cultural relationships. It's all built on trade, and trade is a critical part of global security—a lot more than people think. People think global security is about who's got the biggest weapons or who's projecting force. While those things are important, if we trade with each other, we reduce the chance of regional conflict. So I commend this bill to the House, and I support a bipartisan approach to trade agreements into the future.

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