Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to speak on the Customs Amendment (Anti-dumping Measures) Bill 2013 and the Customs Tariff (Anti-dumping) Amendment Bill 2013. The coalition supports these measures because we are most concerned that we have a stronger, more flexible and 'easier to bring about an action' set of antidumping measures. The country suffered for a very long time when it was evident from the information that there was an antidumping action that should have been brought. However, because of the costs of bringing about a review of the situation and because of the time it took, too often the damage was done to the domestic industry and so people gave up a long time ago. Timeliness, effectiveness and the significant costs—all of those sorts of problems—are now in the process of being addressed. In particular. I want to commend the coalition's plan to strengthen Australia's antidumping regime. I also speak in these remarks on behalf of the shadow minister, the member for Indi. She is of the like mind that Australia's antidumping regime has to be stronger and that it also has to be more in line with other developing nations.

We have a situation in Australia where we are export dependent ourselves. But we also have quite a small domestic market, where a duopoly is in place in the form of Coles and Woolworths, and our own domestic manufacturing certainly will not survive if it is a case of them having to compete with product brought in in ways that are unfair and where they do not have any recourse to measures that can be brought about quickly, appropriately and in accordance with WTO measures. We would see a lot of our manufacturing going to the wall.

The particular issues that are being addressed in these amendments include the removal of the minister's mandatory obligation to consider the so-called lesser duty rule. This was the ridiculous situation—and it is a very old measure that goes back many decades—where the minister of the day was required to always look to a lesser duty, rather than putting in the appropriate duty, if he found an antidumping action was in fact proved. There is also a closer alignment of retrospective duties provisions with the relevant WTO agreements. There is the introduction of new provisions relating to anticircumvention that widen the range of options available to the government, including addressing the practice of sales at a loss and attempts by foreign producers to evade the full payment of duties.

Self-evidently, these are all very sensible measures. The lesser duty changes will ease current restrictions on the minister's ability to choose whether or not to apply a full margin of duty in order to remedy the impact of dumping activity; and, under article 9.3 of the WTO antidumping agreement, antidumping duties may not exceed the dumping margin calculated during an investigation. But the Australian government has also, until now, been limited by further provisions that have forced the minister to consider the lesser duty rule in every case. Quite clearly, that disadvantaged the Australian business or manufacturer trying for an outcome that levelled the playing field in terms of the cost of the imported product and the cost of the domestic product.

The changes to the retrospective notices provisions essentially permit the minister more scope and discretion in making decisions about the level and timing of duties to be retrospectively applied to companies that have dumped goods in Australia, with a view to reversing the damaging effects to local industry more effectively. Again, the coalition strongly support that measure and had already canvassed those very issues in extensive stakeholder communication and consultation. In short, we can see that these measures will provide the minister with greater scope and discretion in considering the level of duties, and the timing of their application, to impose on companies found to have dumped goods in Australia. The measures will also reduce inconsistencies between the approach of Australia and that of other countries in relation to the interpretation of articles 9 and 10 of the WTO antidumping agreement. As I began by saying, these are very significant measures, as is anything that deals with antidumping in an environment like ours, where, as I said, we have a small domestic market, we aim to export and we have some of the world's most valued producers of good-quality, low-cost food.

At the moment, we are seeing a destruction of the food processing industry in Australia. Just today we heard that another company, Simplot, is looking like it will no longer be viable, and it is in fact the last processor of vegetables in Australia. It is not likely that the company will be able to go beyond 12 months of production in one of their factories in New South Wales and only several years more in Tasmania. I am pleased to say that leaves one Simplot factory in Echuca, in my electorate, but that is hardly any consolation when I think of the hundreds of workers out of work and the hundreds of farmers who will no longer be able to supply great vegetables to this company, Simplot, in other regional economies.

The fact is that Simplot are going out of business due to their inability to compete with the extraordinary volume of frozen vegetables now coming into Australia at very low prices. Some of those come via New Zealand. For example, there were recent revelations that frozen broccoli and other vegetables were being imported by New Zealand, packaged in New Zealand, labelled as 'made in New Zealand' and then, under the CER special arrangements, imported into Australia without any tariffs, duties or any other consideration at all. This is the sort of situation in which Australian producers reach for their domestic market, thinking they can at least succeed there if they cannot export in the face of such low-cost product. But then, with the duopoly of Coles and Woolworths, who compete on price and price alone, and are aiming to have 80 per cent of their supermarket produce in the generic or home brand category as soon as they can achieve that goal, growers will also be squeezed on price in the domestic market. Put all that together and you have a very difficult situation for the survival of Australia's food manufacturing sector, even though we all acknowledge that the Asian century presents unprecedented opportunities for high-value food markets, especially protein related markets, into the near future.

SPC Ardmona in particular, a fruit preserving company, right now cannot wait to see improved antidumping measures. They are in the process of submitting an antidumping measure to this government. They are going to submit, in the first instance, an action against Italy for canned tomatoes. We all know that in Italy, as in other European countries—

Debate interrupted.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 17:01