John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to contribute to this debate on the legislation relating to the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement. And I will tell you a little story about when I was a pig farmer. I set up our piggery back in the late eighties. My brother and I did a lot of hard work. We shovelled about 120 tonnes of concrete and gravel into the cement mixer and built the large sheds and set up in the pig industry. We knew when we went into the pig industry that there would be some tough times. Pig prices go up and down, and grain prices certainly fluctuate according to the season. But we never, ever thought we would see a situation in which Australia would be importing pig meat from Canada and Denmark and places like that. The Hawke-Keating Labor government allowed the importation of pig meat, and it had a devastating effect on the pig industry in the Inverell area, where I live. There were five or six large piggeries—and when I say large I mean 100- or 200-sow piggeries. When you run 100 sows you are feeding about 1,000 pigs a day and when you run 200 sows you are feeding about 2,000 pigs a day. When the importing of these pork products from overseas was allowed, I thought, 'This is crazy.' The effect was that it shut down the piggeries.

What I am saying is that we led the world in removing tariffs, barriers, quotas et cetera, and I thought: 'Why are we doing this on our own? The rest of the world is lagging way behind.' Since then we have developed trade with Chile, America and Thailand and now South Korea, Japan and China; we are up to China now. I will say, first of all, that this is not a free trade agreement; this is a fairer trade agreement. To me, a free trade agreement is when the country you are trading with removes all barriers—all tariffs, all quotas, everything. Then you actually have free trade. So, this is what I call a fairer trade agreement that is much fairer than what we had before—the status quo.

This agreement is good for rural Australia. It is good news that Labor has decided to support the free trade deal, or the fairer trade deal, even though the unions are carrying on with their campaign of misinformation. This is probably why the Greens are opposing this. No doubt they will be getting a cheque, come election time, from the CFMEU and the other unions. They are taking the funds off the Labor Party and—