Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Trade and Investment. I remind the minister that a new free trade agreement with South Korea was successfully concluded by the coalition government within its first 100 days. How will this benefit agricultural producers and national award-winning exporters like Cressy based Tasmanian Quality Meats from my electorate of Lyons in Tasmania?

Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Minister for Trade and Investment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the member for Lyons, a man who has had a lifetime involvement in agribusiness and who knows firsthand the challenges that are currently facing the agricultural sector. As I have moved around the world in recent weeks with my trade and investment responsibilities, I have gleaned a mood of disillusionment with the big government interventionist approach that has been adopted by so many governments around the world post the global financial crisis, including those opposite.

Many countries—such as Korea, which recently saw GMH cut the production of 100,000 cars from their country—are coming to the view that the only way to deliver sustainable economic growth which is large enough to start to make inroads into the high unemployment levels is to open up their economies far more to trade and investment and to change the priorities of their governments. This is what others are starting to realise. Those opposite never did. It is why our government sees an urgency in replacing the firestorm of choking regulation and the reckless spending of the last six years. It is why we have moved quickly to settle the free trade agreement with Korea and to move determinedly in our efforts with China, with Japan and with the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The Korean free trade agreement is a world-class agreement. It is an agreement which will restore Australia's competitive position and open up a raft of growth opportunities. It will result in the elimination of over 99 per cent of the tariffs that our exporters currently face across key areas including agriculture, resources, energy and manufactured goods. The new agreement will see new market openings in services, and it will see investment in areas such as finance, accounting and legal services, as well as telecommunications, education, audiovisual engineering, health and many more. It is particularly important for agriculture. Tariffs of 304 per cent will be eliminated from chipping potatoes. Tariffs of 36 to 176 per cent on dairy products will go. Tariffs on seafood, wheat, wine, chocolate, beer, horticulture, pharmaceuticals and many more will go. Tariffs on beef, in particular, will fall from 40 per cent to nothing over 15 years. For sheep meats, in the same way, it will help the member for Lyons— (Time expired)