Arthur Sinodinos (NSW, Liberal Party, Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

Mr President, they obviously do not want to listen to facts and figures. Independent modelling from the Centre for International Economics, released in June this year, show strong benefits to this country from our free trade agreements with China, Japan and Korea. The CIE found that there will be between 5,400 and 14,500 more jobs each year to 2035, with sectors right across the Australian economy set to grow jobs for the future. The Financial Services Council believes these agreements have the potential to create nearly 10,000 new jobs in areas like banking, insurance and funds management by 2030. The dairy industry estimates that, in its first year, the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement will alone generate 600 to 700 new jobs. These figures do not include the jobs set to flow from the unprecedented Trans-Pacific Partnership.

I have to qualify this by saying that modelling cannot forecast the enormous benefits that will flow from the increased opportunities for our service industries or from the new jobs that will be created from the growth in the two-way investment that inevitably follows when you deepen trading relations as well as people-to-people and business-to-business linkages.

These agreements create jobs in Australia and they create jobs overseas, and often those jobs go to people at the lower end of the income spectrum, because it these agreements stimulate activity in basic sectors of those economies. We should be proud of entering into free trade agreements which provide prosperity for those countries and for us.