Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, I present the committee's report entitled Review of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Annual Report 2009-10. On behalf of the committee, I table the report.

In accordance with standing order 39(f), the report was made a parliamentary paper.

The review is the first conducted by the committee since 2001-02 and is very timely given the transformations taking place across the world and our region, particularly the rise of China and India as economic powers and to some extent military powers in our region, the economic turmoil in the United States and Europe and the uprisings in the Middle East which just this morning have led to the demise of the odious Gaddafi regime in Libya with the fleeing of the said gentleman. These are challenges that confront our political and national security and strategic policy interests. The review is structured around the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's three suggested outcomes but contains an additional chapter on other issues raised during the inquiry. I must say it is probably a good idea, in my view, that the committee look at the department's report on a more regular basis. The first outcome suggested by the department focuses on the advancement of Australia's international strategic, security and economic interests. This includes matters such as Australia's representation overseas, the department of foreign affairs' human rights activities and dialogues and the department's public diplomacy activity. While Australia maintains an extensive network of diplomatic posts, the committee found that there is a substantial question in relation to the adequacy of the services it provides overseas on behalf of Australia. The committee is of the view that a substantial inquiry needs to be undertaken on Australia's representation overseas so that comprehensive advice can be provided to the government on how Australia's interests might be better served by Australia's diplomats. Currently the number of Australian embassies and missions overseas totals 89. This is far below comparable countries in the OECD, which average 150. Of the 30 developed nations in the OECD, Australia has fewer missions than all but four.

In regard to the department of foreign affairs' human rights dialogues, the committee notes the role played in facilitating bilateral human rights dialogues with China, Vietnam and Iran—the one with Iran is now defunct—and looks forward to developing these dialogues, particularly with the ongoing involvement of Australian parliamentarians and oversight by this House. It is worth noting that the committee has recently received a reference from the minister to conduct an inquiry into Australia's human rights dialogues with Vietnam and China.

In the area of public diplomacy the committee considers that the department of foreign affairs needs to make stronger efforts to capitalise on the potential offered by modern communications technology in the dissemination and collection of information. Greater effort is needed by DFAT to understand current and future e-diplomacy opportunities.

The second outcome recommended by the department involves protection of Australians abroad and the provision of passport services. The committee found that the department of foreign affairs provides valuable advice to Australians travelling overseas; however, our efforts need to be directed towards increasing the proportion of Australians using Smartraveller. Furthermore, while travel advisories have always been contentious, liability issues associated with understanding the level of risk means it is wise to take a cautious approach in issuing travel advisories.

The third outcome details the department's efforts towards providing for a secure Australian government presence overseas via the provision of security services and the management of Australia's overseas owned estate. The committee is satisfied with the department's efforts in this area but cautions that the department of foreign affairs needs to maintain security of its e-network in particular.

Two other issues arose during the review: gender equality within the department and staffing implications of DFAT's funding. The committee noted the considerable gender disparity at the senior executive level, but the department made the point that very high proportions of graduate intakes are female. The committee is satisfied with the response to date.

There has been a long-term relative decline in the funding of the department. This has resulted in staff cutbacks experienced by the department under successive governments. Consequently, Australia has fewer diplomatic posts, as I said earlier, compared to comparable OECD countries. The committee is pleased to note, however, the recent increase in DFAT's funding. This trend should be continued and the number of overseas posts increased. I note the Lowy report was in the newspapers today. It makes a number of other suggestions.

I thank the committee secretariat—Dr Carter, James Bunce, Rhys Merrett, Jessica Butler and Sonya Gaspar—for all their great work. (Time expired)

Stuart Robert (Fadden, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Defence Science, Technology and Personnel) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I join the member for Melbourne Ports in providing some comment on the recent review of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade annual report 2009-10 by the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade. I join him in thanking the secretariat for the wonderful work they have done. The chair of this committee has been far too generous of the state of the current Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade under the austere stewardship of the current Minister for Foreign Affairs, the member for Griffith. The department is becoming increasingly focused on Australia's bid for a seat on the UN Security Council to the detriment of so many other areas that it needs to focus on. One of those important areas is our relationship with Indonesia. The live trade debacle was a complete and utter fiasco, attributed in part to a DFAT that, unfortunately, has been utterly put to task by the foreign minister on a range of other matters. I am sure Australia's beef producers will be interested to hear that the foreign minister is far more interested in getting a spot for two years on the UN Security Council than he is in representing the interests of thousands of Australian families in the north of Australia.

Our relationships with our neighbours, such as PNG and Fiji, remain important but again are being left to deteriorate because of the foreign minister's unwavering and unexplainable obsession with getting Australia a two-year seat on the UN Security Council. His actions, frankly, are jeopardising Australia's place within the region and the world, not to put too fine a point on it. The shadow foreign affairs spokesperson, Julie Bishop, stated:

In the absence of a credible explanation, one can only assume it is an ego-driven campaign to satisfy Kevin Rudd's vanity.

These sentiments have been backed up by the recently released Lowy Institute report that is, frankly, damning of DFAT and its minister. The report speaks of a broken department and a grossly inadequate diplomatic footprint with too few international posts and too many bureaucrats in Canberra. Indeed, the report states that Australia has about 89 embassies and consulates compared to the OECD average of over 150. In the light of such numbers the report puts up one can only assume that Lowy has got it right—that it is grossly and utterly inadequate. Morocco has an embassy in Australia, yet our footprint in Africa is slight, to say the very least.

The report notes that there is exceptionally low foreign language capability. Less than a quarter of DFAT staff speak a second language and less than 10 per cent speak an Asian language. Minister Rudd's obsession with obtaining a place on the UN Security Council is debilitating an already overstretched department, which is failing to meet even basic demands. That is what the Lowy Institute report states. Despite some improvements at the margins, DFAT still faces serious shortfalls. The Lowy report states:

Unless these deficiencies are remedied, our economic, political and security interests could be seriously jeopardised.

Those are frightening words from an independent report looking at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade under the stewardship of this Labor government. I repeat, the report says:

Unless these deficiencies are remedied, our economic, political and security interests could be seriously jeopardised.

With 747 Kev flying around the world at twice the rate of any commensurable minister in the history of our nation, we still have an independent report saying that our interests could be seriously jeopardised. The report continues:

For a highly globalised country facing a more challenging external environment, Australia's diplomatic footprint remains too limited.

I am sure Prime Minister Gillard is more than happy for Foreign Minister Rudd to be travelling around the world and, frankly, not in Australia. It takes more than just flying in and flying out, Foreign Minister Rudd, to maintain close relationships with other nation states. The Lowy Institute poll goes on to say the real opportunity far exceeds the $23 million cost. I commend the report to the House. I ask the government to correct the deficiencies before it is too late. (Time expired)

Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

() (): On behalf of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, I present the committee's report entitled Australia's trade and investment relations with Asia, the Pacific and Latin America.

In accordance with standing order 39(f) the report was made a parliamentary paper.

It gives me great pleasure to present the committee's report for this parliament. Through a lengthy and informative inquiry, members of the Trade Subcommittee explored how we can improve Australia's trade and investment relations with the countries of Asia, the Pacific and the Americas. Trade is important to economic health and critical to the development of bilateral and multilateral relationships between countries.

On the eve of going to print with our report, the Minister for Trade, the Hon. Craig Emerson MP, informed the subcommittee that he would soon publish the government's trade policy statement. We agreed to wait for the statement and then took evidence on it. This has been incorporated into our report.

When we commenced the inquiry, little did we know that the global financial crisis was breathing down our neck and it came to besiege our nation and most of our trading partners. How Australia weathered the financial crisis is the envy of the world, in particular those with developed economies. Australia's economy is strong and is ranked 12th within the OECD for GDP purchasing power parity. Closer to home, most people seem surprised, when the miracle of Singapore is touted, to discover that the New South Wales economy is significantly larger than Singapore's.

The global financial crisis caused some alarm that commitment to open trade would dissolve, and in some cases it did. Surprisingly, though, the general commitment to open trade held largely in order to complete the Doha round of negotiations. Agricultural trade remains the most contentious issue not only for developing countries but for developed economies as well.

Trading figures for Australia are healthy and on the rise. The Australian dollar is currently trading at an all-time high against other major trading currencies. This generally has the effect of making Australian exports less competitive as the purchasing power of foreign currencies is reduced. Despite this, healthy export revenues are contributing to trade surpluses through strong market prices and demand for Australian resources. Conversely, a strong Australian dollar sees imported products becoming more competitively priced for Australian consumers, leading to increased consumption. Both of these strengths are reflected in the current health of Australia's economy.

During the inquiry, the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand Free Trade Agreement was signed off in February 2009, which was greeted enthusiastically particularly by business. The Productivity Commission also released its report on bilateral free trade agreements. Both of these were the subject of much attention during the inquiry. The Productivity Commission's report noted, however, that there is little evidence to date to suggest that Australia's six free trade agreements have produced substantial commercial benefits. The Productivity Commission's report also found that where trade had increased it was due to trade diversion rather than trade creation. Trade facilitation features large in our report, as it did for all who gave evidence to the inquiry.

The report makes a number of recommendations focused on trade facilitation, including that Australia continue to strongly support the work in APEC on the identification and elimination of chokepoints in regional supply chains and the development of modern and efficient communication networks. The report recommends Australia work towards a complete introduction of paperless trading as soon as possible and encourage and, where necessary, assist its trading partners to achieve the same outcome.

The report also recommends that Australia should strongly encourage the complete acceptance of the APEC business travel card by the remaining members of APEC, and also explore the possibility of establishing a similar arrangement with other trading partners. It recommends COAG make improved cooperation between the Commonwealth and states, and between the states themselves, a high priority.

To achieve higher levels of efficiency in the transport and logistics supply chains, the report recommends the provision of infrastructure and trade facilitation. I note there was some movement on transport at the COAG meeting on the weekend. I note that because I prepared my contribution before that took place. The report also made several recommendations focused on boosting trade with Latin America, including improvements to visa application, skills recognition, working holiday programs and increased bilateral visits with countries in the region. Australian jobs depend in a large part on reciprocal trade and it is so for both city and country alike. This often gets lost in partisan political debate. (Time expired)

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with great pleasure that I follow the Chair of the Trade Subcommittee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, the member for Page, on this very important inquiry into and report on Australia's trade and investment relations with Asia, the Pacific and Latin America. This inquiry commenced in the last parliament. That is not a reflection of the difficulties we had getting evidence; it is just that it is a very large region we were inquiring into. It included the Pacific Rim, North and South America and the Asian area including Russia, which was of interest. I think many people out there may not realise the important role that Russia and Latin America play in APEC discussions. I think that if you look at the three regions—Asia, the Pacific Rim and Latin America—geographically they are so close to Australia and very important to our trading relations in the years ahead. Whilst we may have taken into the second parliament to complete this report, I commend the recommendations and this report to the many out there interested in trading in this region.

I also want to acknowledge the people, the embassies and high commissions and the members of the business community who made submissions to our committee. They were always so professional, and I would leave those committee hearings thinking, 'If only we could do a bit more to facilitate trade and break down some of the inherent barriers that have been there,' because there is a desperate need to ensure we continue to grow our domestic economy but that also means seeing that the economies of the countries that we trade with continue to grow.

One of those areas that I was interested in, as the recommendations in the press release suggest, was breaking down and doing a lot more work through APEC on those choke points and supply chains, because that is about efficiency of delivery. Another one was the introduction of a paperless trading system, because it came up repeatedly that the paperwork can so often bog down and delay a delivery of a commodity, on both sides of the equation. We have to do more work through APEC in that regard, and it might also mean assisting other trading partners within this region to develop those paperless systems and moving away from multiple supply lines of paper that often gets lost. In the electronic age in which we live today, this is something we should facilitate as much as possible not only here in Australia but also in our trading partners to assist those companies that may not be able to do it as quickly as we would like. Perhaps, as the recommendation suggests, we could assist those other countries.

Another area was to encourage the acceptance of an APEC business travel card. We found that mentioned by a lot of businesspeople in their submissions—that sometimes where a visa is needed we could do more to facilitate cooperation and that investment. Also, it was seen sometimes as a barrier—'Can we go now and meet with another country where there may be a business opportunity?' So I commend that also; I would like to see more work done on that through APEC to encourage the acceptance of an APEC business travel card. It sounds small, but it was one of those things that sometimes became an annoyance. There should be that facilitation for visits to build greater confidence in trade.

Another one was to work through COAG with the state governments. Quite often we found that states were doing something to facilitate trade with a particular trading partner and the Commonwealth was also trying to do it. It sends a confusing message when it is the same nation as a whole trying to facilitate trade in other countries, and we need to work through COAG to get greater cooperation between the Commonwealth and the states and to avoid overlap when it comes to that work that is, at the end of the day, creating jobs in Australia.

Finally, I thank the secretariat for the wonderful work that they do. They are just tireless—Tas Luttrell, who we had for so long, and more recently other members of the departments here in Canberra. I thank them. I thank all of those who have participated, including the business community and the high commissions and embassies who have made submissions to this very important report. I commend the recommendations to the parliament.

Sid Sidebottom (Braddon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time allotted for statements on this report has expired.

Janelle Saffin (Page, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the House take note of the report.

Debate adjourned.